


Smoothie

by Jane Elliot (JaneElliot)



Series: Previously Published [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Action, Adventure & Romance, BAMF Women, Previously Published
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-12 05:14:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 55,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19222321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaneElliot/pseuds/Jane%20Elliot
Summary: Heather George used to dream about adventures.She never imagined anything likethis.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Another novel previously published by Manifold Press. Fair warning: this one's much more on the adventure side of the adventure and romance spectrum. Enjoy!

It all started with a smoothie.  In fact, the whole mess could be blamed on the smoothie.  If Sweet Sal didn't serve up such a ridiculously tasty Strawberry-Banana-Peach Sundae Smoothie, I would never have been tempted away from my latest diet and would never have been anywhere near South Beach when the bomb went off, which meant I'd never have met Natalie, never gotten shot at, never been on the run from the police, and never ripped out my own heart and stomped on it.

Hard to believe such an innocuous treat could be blamed for so much.

Maybe I should back up a bit.  My name is Heather George.  I'm 5'9", have long black hair, small brown eyes, a whole lot more weight than I care to think about, and, if anyone cares, I'm a Libra.  I work as an administrative assistant at South Seas Cruise Lines, where I spend most of my time sitting around waiting for people to give me work and surreptitiously reading British classics online. I have no social life, in large part due to the fact that my IQ is just high enough for me to be completely without social skills while simultaneously making me as geeky as a woman working at a cruise line company in Miami can possibly be, which means I spend a lot of time chatting with people online and writing stories featuring my favorite TV show characters.

The one bit of excitement in my life comes from my imagination, which tends to come alive right when I most desperately want to sleep, providing an assortment of random what-if scenarios.  On the one hand, this means I have chronic insomnia.  On the other hand, if I ever get shoved out of a plane without a parachute, I already have a plan in place.  And I pity the fool who tries to pull me out of my car and attack me at a rest stop.  I have a hammer and I plan to aim for the knees.

On the day of the bombing, I was waiting in line at Sweet Sal's cart and contemplating what I would do if I got attacked by sharks.  It wasn't a terribly interesting scenario, because -- unlike falling out of an airplane without a parachute, for example -- there wasn't much I could do other than take a deep breath before going under and then doing my best to poke the shark's eyes out.  Hopefully the shark would be disoriented enough to let me go.  In reality, I'd probably be dead. 

I was just making a mental note to myself to practice holding my breath more in the future when the car bomb went off. 

Of course, I didn't know it was a bomb at the time.  All I knew was that something slammed into my side, knocking me to the ground.  A split second later sound and heat caught up: an ear-shattering boom, a sudden scorching burn that overwhelmed my senses, and for a stretch of time I couldn't see or hear anything at all.

When I picked myself up off the ground, I was in the middle of chaos.  Less than thirty feet away was a conflagration that had already consumed three cars.  Black smoke billowing out of the flames filled the air with an oily, acrid stench.  All around me were people: some wandering around looking stunned, some running around looking panicked, and a few lying on the ground, unconscious or worse.  Most of them were bleeding and I could see at least two with broken limbs.  Making things even more terrifying was the fact that I couldn't hear anything aside from a high-pitched buzzing, despite the fact that I could see several people screaming.

A hot, stinging liquid dripped into my eye and I swiped at it irritably, only to have my hand come back stained with blood.  I cursed, I think, though I couldn't even hear myself, and probed my forehead.  From the amount of blood dripping down there had to be a significant cut there, but I couldn't feel anything.  Further investigation found a nasty wound on the underside of my wrist where my fall had scraped away a large patch of skin.  It wasn't bleeding heavily and I could barely feel it, but I knew from experience that it would hurt like hell once sensation returned.

I don't know how long I stood there, feeling overwhelmed, before it eventually occurred to me that I had a first aid kit in the trunk of my car.  Feeling like I was sleepwalking through water, I made my way past several cars with blown out windows before finding my aging Saturn, blessedly intact.  Still numb, I fumbled my keys twice before I managed to separate out the car key and get it into the trunk lock. 

I'd just barely managed to find the first aid kit when I felt myself shoved again.  As I tumbled forward into the trunk, I caught a glimpse of a lean, coltish woman with dirty blonde hair and bright green eyes shoving my legs into the trunk after my body.  Then the trunk lid slammed shut and I found myself trapped in darkness.

Now, I'll admit I'd never before considered a scenario where I found myself less than thirty feet away from a car bomb on South Beach.  Being locked in my own trunk, on the other hand, was a subject I'd given considerable thought.  Unfortunately, I hadn't really considered the dimensions of my trunk or myself when I was coming up with my daring escape plan.  If I was at the same weight I'd been in high school, I might have been able to turn around and get to the lights.  Ten years of too much pizza and chocolate had taken their toll, however, and at my current size I had about as much chance of flipping over in the trunk as I did of spontaneously turning into Superwoman and punching my way free.

I wasted a few miles trying to kick out the rear lights by sheer luck and then a few more randomly swinging my arm around in the hopes that it would catch the release cord.  All I managed to do in the process was get slightly more bruised and considerably more sweaty.  A closed car trunk was just about the last place you want to be in the middle of a Miami summer.

That just left the scariest, most dangerous option. 

The back seats of my car were designed so they could be laid down to allow for larger objects to be put in the trunk.  I'd moved to Miami with only what I could cram into my car and must've damaged something in the process; I'd never managed to get the seats to firmly latch again.  It would be easy to push the seats forward and slide myself out of the trunk.

The downside, of course, was that this would put me inside the vehicle with my carjacker. 

I dithered for a few miles, then dithered some more.  What was the worst that could happen, anyway?  I mean, aside from me getting killed if the carjacker got us into an accident.  Or her driving the car into the ocean.  Or her dragging me out of the trunk, beating me to a bloody pulp, then murdering me.

Well.  If nothing else, I might be able to piss her off enough to skip the beating and go straight to the killing.

The next few minutes involved some unpleasant wriggling as I had to shift my way past a bottle of windshield wiper fluid, a gallon of water, and a tire iron, but sooner than I really wanted I found myself in the right position.  I kept the tire iron in hand and took a deep breath, taking a moment to wipe sticky sweat away from my forehead.  Then, in one fast movement, I pushed the seat back forward and launched myself through --

– right into the footwell. 

The car swerved, probably because I'd just slammed into the back of the driver's seat.  "What the fuck?" the carjacker swore.

I scrambled to my knees and held up the tire iron menacingly.  "Stop the car!" I shouted.  Then I noticed the vast ocean that very nearly surrounded the car.  "Are we in the Keys?"

The carjacker didn't even glance at me, though she did ask, "How did you get out of the trunk?"

"I'm the one with the tire iron, so I'm the one asking questions," I retorted with my best bravado.  "Who are you?  Why did you steal my car?"

"I'm Natalie," she answered.  "And I needed a car."

"Then buy one!"

"I did.  It blew up."

I gaped at her.  "That was _your_ car?"

"I'm not having the best day."

"Well then, that makes two of us."  I jabbed the pointy end of the iron into her neck.  "Pull the car over.  Now."

Natalie sighed and said, "I'm really sorry about this."  Then she slammed on the brakes.  Since I wasn't buckled in, I found myself launched forward over the front seats and into the dashboard.  Natalie winced.  "You okay?"

"No!"  I slowly toppled over into the passenger seat with a groan.  "Also?  I hate you."

"That's totally fair," Natalie said as she sped the car back up.  "If it helps, I promise I'm not going to hurt you."

"You just _did_!"

"You were threatening me with a tire iron."

"You're stealing my car!"

"My life's in danger," Natalie said.  "I did what I had to do."

I opened my mouth, but couldn't come up with a rejoinder.  Unsure of what to do next, I pointedly buckled my seatbelt and settled in to consider my options.  Which, unfortunately, were few.  Natalie didn't seem intent on hurting or killing me and I still had the tire iron.  Unless one of those two circumstances changed, I wasn't prepared to risk certain injury by throwing myself out of a moving vehicle.  I also didn't want to crash my car if it could be avoided; the move to Miami six months before had cleaned out most of my savings and I couldn't afford the deductible to get my car fixed, much less a monthly car payment if it had to be replaced.

As we drove along in silence, my adrenaline rush slowly began fading and my body started registering that all was not well in the world of Heather.  My palm began to sweat against the metal of the tire iron.  My throat got drier.  Worst of all, my head and wrist started to hurt like crazy, making it really hard for me to concentrate on what to do next.  It didn't help that I kept hearing a strange dripping noise off to my right side.  It was slow but regular and very, very annoying.

Finally I burst out.  "Can you hear that?"

"Hear what?" Natalie asked as she glanced over.  She promptly slammed on the brakes and I went flying forward again.  Thankfully the seat belt kept me from going too far, but I could hear at least two horns behind us, blaring in protest.

"What the _hell_?" I shouted.  "Stop doing that!"

"You're bleeding," Natalie said, sounding _worried_ , bizarre as that was.  "Did that happen when you hit the dashboard?"

I frowned and touched my forehead.  Sure enough, my fingers came back red; apparently not all of that sticky moisture on my face had been sweat.  A little further investigating turned up a small puddle of blood that had gathered where my right arm was pressed against my stomach, making a natural bowl for the blood that was slowly dripping down my face.   As I watched, a drop of blood fell into the puddle and made a dripping noise.  "Huh.  I thought that'd stopped."

"Fuck," Natalie said, pulling off onto one of the dirt frontage roads that doubled as parking lots alongside the highway.  Just a few feet away the dirt ended and the smooth, crystal clear waters of the ocean began.  As far as the eye could see there was nothing but clear blue skies and turquoise water.  _Not a bad place to die_. 

Natalie suddenly waved a hand in front of my face.  "I think you're going into shock."

"I think I'm still in shock from the bomb," I admitted, but Natalie was already out of the car.  I didn't even think to look for my keys until she was at the passenger door, though it hardly mattered as the keys weren't in the ignition.

I looked back as Natalie ripped open the passenger door and crouched down to look in.  Natalie’s eyes looked even brighter up close, and tendrils from her sloppy ponytail framed her face beautifully.  I breathed in deep and swallowed hard; she smelled as wonderful as she looked.  Next to her I felt like a beached whale with my wobbly double chin and straining plus-sized clothes and I was suddenly very aware of the fact that I was sweating like a pig in the humid heat.

"Do you have a first aid kit?" she asked, poking at my hairline.

I blinked at her twice, then responded in the way I always did around a woman I found attractive: I turned bright red, my mouth went dry as cotton, and my throat closed up.  Even worse, I started to giggle.  Which was ridiculous.  I almost never giggle.  I'm just not a giggly sort of girl.  Except at that moment, when I couldn't seem to stop.

"Is that a no?" Natalie asked wryly.

I shook my head, full-out laughing now.  "T-t-trunk," I managed to gasp out between wheezes.  The irony of the situation made me laugh harder, though in the back of my mind I wondered if I was starting to get hysterical.

She shook her head in turn, looking exasperated, but went back to the trunk.  A few seconds later she came back with the commercial-sized first aid kit my mom had given me before my first road trip.  It had been an impulse buy on her part, but it's been handy.

Of course, after ten years a lot of the packaging turned out to be compromised, and Natalie ended up throwing a pile of less-than-sterile bandages to the roadside before finding a gauze pad she deemed worthy.  At first I just watched without saying anything, except for the occasional chuckle, but the silence worked on me until I finally said, "I hope you're planning on cleaning that up."   Then I mentally kicked myself for being an ass.

Natalie pressed the pad against my forehead and I couldn't quite hold back a hiss as the cotton rubbed painfully against the edges of my wound.  On the plus side, I didn't feel like giggling anymore.

"Tell you what," she said as she lifted my hand and moved it so that it was holding the pad in place.  "I'll clean it up if you agree to get out of the car."

"Absolutely not," I said indignantly.  "This is _my_ car."

"And I have the keys," Natalie pointed out, ripping open a pre-soaked iodine wipe and digging out the sopping scrap of cloth.

"Which are _also mine_."

"Entirely beside the point.  Here, lift your hand for a second so I can clean the wound."

I scowled, but did as directed and did my best not to wince as Natalie diligently rubbed iodine all over my forehead.  _If this were a movie, this would probably be a very sexy scene_ , I thought wistfully as iodine dripped unsexily all over my nicest work suit.  Of course, if this were a movie I'd weigh a hundred and twenty pounds and would be wearing a miniskirt and a padded bra. 

"How about a compromise?" I offered once my forehead was sufficiently bandaged and Natalie was inspecting my wrist.  It wasn't bleeding anymore, but dirt and sand appeared to have been ground into the wound.  "You give me my keys and I'll drive you wherever you want to go."

Natalie paused in the process of ripping open an antiseptic wipe to stare at me incredulously.  "Is that a joke?"

I shrugged uncomfortably.  "I can't afford to buy a new car."

"You can't buy back your life, either."

I shot a pointed look at my still open first aid kit.  "Are you trying to say you're going to kill me?  Really?"

"I wouldn't kill you directly," Natalie said, and for the first time since I met her she actually sounded a little scary.  "But you stay with me, you're going to end up dead."

Considering the car bomb, her argument had merit.  On the other hand, I was far more afraid of being broke than I was of being dead.  The thought of being dependent on the charity of strangers was, frankly, terrifying.  Unfortunately, I didn't think that argument would be very convincing to someone who wasn't me.

"Where are you headed, anyway?" I asked instead.  "If you've got bomb-wielding assassins on your tail, I'm assuming you aren't planning on flying out of here."

Natalie let out a startled-sounding laugh.  "Actually I am.  But not out of Key West or Marathon."

Key West and Marathon Key had the only two official airports on the entire archipelago.  If Natalie wasn't flying out of one of them, then ... "Hijacking a tour plane?" I asked hopefully.

Natalie shook her head and suddenly found a need to start cleaning up the discarded supplies.

That only left one option.

"And here I was thinking how nice you were for a kidnapper," I said, feeling oddly disappointed.  "I never would have taken you for a drug smuggler."

"I'm not a drug smuggler," Natalie snapped, sitting back on her heels with a pile of bloody scraps of fabric and age-yellowed gauze in front of her.  I stared at her for a few seconds until she looked away and added, "Though I have been known to do business with them from time to time."

"So you're a drug buyer."

Natalie shook her head.

Baffled now, I guessed, "User?"

"I'm an information broker," she burst out.  She paused, looking a little surprised at herself before adding, "Sorry.  I'm just ... I don't do drugs.  At all."

Clearly it was a sore subject, which just made me desperately curious to know why.  However, before I could manage any subtle questioning -- for example, "If you hate drugs so much, why do you do business with drug dealers?" -- Natalie glanced over my shoulder and her eyes widened.  "And, really, I'm not a kidnapper.  In fact, you're free to go.  Here, take your keys and get out of here."

"Wha – " I started to ask, but I was interrupted by the sound of screeching tires. 

"Shit," Natalie said, slapping the keys into my hand and shoving me over to the driver's side seat, nearly dislocating my hip in the process as I fell over the gearshift.  A sharp report echoed through the air and when I managed to get my head above the dashboard, I saw a round hole in the windshield where my head would have been if I'd been more graceful in sliding over.

"Drive!" Natalie shouted, jumping into the car.

There have been a couple of times in my life when I almost died.  Once when I was in high school, a friend's father gave me a ride home from a softball game.  He ran a stop sign and an incoming car t-boned us, nearly flipping the truck and caving in my door.  I walked away with nothing more than bruises and whiplash.  If I hadn't been wearing a seatbelt or if we'd been in a vehicle that sat lower to the ground, I wouldn't have been so lucky.

The second time was when I was taking a semester of college abroad in New Zealand.  While on a field trip to the Bay of Islands, I decided to save money on the rest of the class's kayaking trip by swimming to an island instead.  I was about a quarter of a mile into the swim before I realized how misleading distance is over water; at that point I was closer to the nearest yacht than I was to either the beach or the island.  In the end I was too young and stupid to turn back and flipped over instead, doing a backstroke so I wouldn't have to worry about breathing.  I chanted "I'm-gon-na-make-it-I'm-gon-na-make-it" in time with my breathing and tried to ignore the way the seagulls swooped down mere inches above my face, clearly waiting for me to expire and provide them with a tasty meal.  I did survive the trip to the island and back, but by the time I reached the shore my legs were too weak to hold me and I had to kneel in the shallow water for ten minutes before I was strong enough to drag myself to land. 

In both of my near-death experiences, I found myself getting more and more calm as danger approached: when I thought I was going to drown or be eaten by seagulls I lowered my head so my ears were below water and all I could hear was the sound of my voice echoing in my head that I was going to make it.  When my father's friend gave me that ride I watched as the car headed for the truck, too late to warn anyone or to stop the accident, and time seemed to slow as I braced for impact.

That same slowing sensation occurred as I saw that bullet hole in my windshield.  Natalie's jump into the car seemed to go at half speed as I looked up to see in my rear-view mirror that my back windshield was a spider web of cracked glass through which I could just barely make out two shapes that were probably gunmen.

Calm blanketed over me.  Natalie was yelling something; I dismissed it.  My skin was buzzing from adrenaline; I pushed the sensation away.  Another hole appeared in my windshield, causing the entire piece of glass to crack; I barely noticed.  All of my attention was on getting myself into my seat and finding my car key, both of which I did in a muffled haze.  As smooth as an action star I slid the key into the ignition, turned on the car, and pulled out onto the highway.

Time and sound and sensation returned in a rush as Natalie whooped and I suddenly realized that my hands were trembling, I was drenched in sour sweat, and my long hair was blowing all over the place thanks to the wind swirling about my newly-ventilated vehicle.  "Oh my God," I said weakly.

"That was incredible," Natalie said jubilantly.  " _You_ were incredible!"  She whooped again, and laughed, though her laughter was tinged with mania.

I, on the other hand, was weak and shaky and exhausted and I might very well have peed myself, though my clothes were so soaked with sweat it was impossible to be sure.  "Oh my God," I said again.

Natalie pumped her fist a couple of times, as if she had so much energy she just couldn't contain it all, then turned to me.  "You okay?"

_No_ , I thought.  "Yes."  I took a deep breath and tried to be rational.  "What's next?"

She let out a sigh and sat back in the passenger seat.  "Now you take me to my plane."

I nodded.  "And then what?"

"And then ... I'm out of your life," Natalie answered, looking a little confused, as if she thought I was asking a trick question.

"What about the men?  You know, the ones who were just shooting at us?  The ones who _saw my license plate_?"

"Oh."  Natalie shifted in her seat.  "Well.  I'm sure it won't be a big deal.  They probably won't even remember it."

I turned to stare at her incredulously.  She winced.  "Look, these guys aren't police.  Probably."

" _Probably?_ "  I gritted my teeth and took a deep breath.  "Who is trying to kill you, exactly?"

Natalie sighed.  "Honestly?  I'm not sure yet.  I've got a few enemies."

I had a sneaking suspicion that by "a few" she meant "a googolplex" and was about to ask a follow-up question when she said, "Turn here."

I stared at the sign for the tennis club.  "What, here?"

"Yes!"

"Okay," I said doubtfully and hit the brakes and spun the wheel.  It was actually a satisfyingly dramatic turn, fishtailing and all.  On Natalie's directions, I turned right again onto the frontage road rather than follow the driveway up to the tennis club and we rattled over gravel for a half a mile in the direction of our shooters, less than ten feet off the main highway where we were impossible to overlook.  "Are you sure about this?" I asked doubtfully.

"Yep.  Slow down, it's easy to miss."

Ten seconds later I found out what "it" was when Natalie said, "Quick, turn left now."

I stared at the wall of trees uncertainly.  "Um.  I think that's a swamp."  Natalie snarled.  "Okay, okay."  Muttering under my breath, I turned ...

… and found myself driving down a barely visible driveway, so narrow that my side mirrors scraped bark off the occasional tree.  In the interests of not losing the mirrors altogether, I slowed down to a crawl.

As we inched our way down the track, the bright warmth of the late afternoon sun was quickly darkened by the thick canopy of trees.  "I didn't realize the trees were this tall," I commented, risking a quick glance through the upper windshield.  "They don't look that tall from the road."

"Most are only fifteen to twenty feet," Natalie said absently; she was peering intently into the dim light ahead.  "Taller than humans but shorter than most trees.  It's an optical illusion, really -- your eyes expect trees to tower over you; when they don't, you underestimate the height that they really are."

"Huh," I said, looking up at the trees again.  I wouldn't have thought of the explanation, but it did make sense. 

Natalie looked over at me.  "Sorry, I've been told I'm a know-it-all."

"That's okay," I answered, suddenly, despite everything, feeling a little lighter.  "People tell me the same thing."

She looked at me in surprise.  "Really?"

"Yep.  Certified fount of useless trivia."

I was about to propose a mini trivia competition when I was saved from what would have surely been an enormous social misstep by the trees widening into a tiny clearing at the edge of what looked like a river.  I frowned.  "I didn't think there were any rivers in the Keys."

"There aren't," Natalie said.  "It's a saltwater channel, one of several on the island.  If you look at them from the air they're very straight, which means they're probably man-made from way back when, before there was a United States or a Florida."  She winced again.  "Sorry."

"Don't apologize," I said honestly.  "I love learning new trivia.  For example, I'd love to know how a plane is going to land here."

Natalie's lips quirked up in a surprised-looking smile, even as she shook her head.  "Actually, it's not.  There's a boat just past the edge of the trees.  You take the boat through the channels to the open ocean, where a biplane is waiting."

"Cool," I said, opening my door.  "I've never been in a biplane before."

The smile disappeared as if it'd been cut off.  "And you're not flying in one now.  Look -- crap, I don't even know what your name is."

"Janet," I offered helpfully, getting out of the car and heading for the water to look for the boat.  "Janet Meyer.  And _you_ look.  There are gunmen after you and they think you're with me.  Which means there are gunmen after me.  Gunmen who may or may not be policemen, which means there's nowhere in Florida that's safe.  Have I about summed that up correctly?"

A voice I'd never heard before said, "That sounds about right to me."

I spun around to find five big burly guys wearing khakis and Hawaiian shirts standing behind me.

They were carrying machine guns.


	2. Chapter 2

"What the fuck is this, Bishop?" Natalie growled as she stepped out of the car.  I stayed next to the water, my hands up in the air, and watched in horrified fascination as the tallest man of the group stepped forward.  Bishop, assuming that's who the guy was, had to be at least six and a half feet tall, with a dark tan, brown hair, and a long, ugly scar on the side of his neck.  He wore sunglasses and a machine gun, but the latter was just draped over his shoulder and he took off the former as he smiled at Natalie.  It was a creepy smile.

"Nat, my girl," he said, shaking his head and tsking for emphasis.  "What kind of shitstorm have you gotten yourself into now?"

"One that I'd planned on flying out of," Natalie said, shifting just a bit to the side and taking several steps back.  It took me a moment to realize that she'd positioned herself between me and two of the machine guns.  It was nice gesture and all, but I was pretty sure the remaining two guns would be more than enough to kill me so I inched a bit to the side myself, getting as close to the trees as I could without my intent being obvious.

"Did you now?" Bishop asked and, really, the man just sounded smarmy.  Not to mention the fact that he was a walking, talking cliché.  Was this the guy Natalie was counting on to get her out of here?

Then the entire situation took a turn for the worse when Bishop turned in my direction.  "And who's the new girl?" he asked, giving me a dismissive once-over. "I gotta say, she's not really your type."

Despite everything, my heart thudded extra hard for a beat or two as I realized that meant Natalie batted for my team.  Ridiculous, of course.  She might play my sport, but she was way out of my league.

"She's Sandra," Natalie said without missing a beat and I offered up a forced smile and tiny wave, though my arms were really starting to hurt from keeping them raised.  "She doesn't know anything about what's going on."

"Really?" Bishop said.  "I find that hard to believe, after Jocelyn."

"I like to think I learned from Jocelyn."

_Who the hell is Jocelyn?_ I wondered as I eased over a couple more steps.  I could just about touch the trees now, if my arms had been stretched to the sides rather than over my head.

"Not that it matters," Bishop added.  "There's a considerable price on your head, Nat, and, as you know, I've been trying to come up with capital for my new venture."

Natalie made a tsking noise of her own.  "How many times have I told you, you should stick with cigars.  The blow business isn't what it used to be.  Too much competition, not enough customers.  Everyone's doing designers these days.  Besides, how're you going to get your tips if you kill me?"

As Bishop chuckled, I took one last sliding step to the side, which put that foot firmly in the underbrush.  Hopefully that would be good enough, because I wasn't going to be able to move any farther without being noticed.

"You were always a smooth talker," Bishop said, sounding amused.  "But a hundred grand talks a lot louder."

I gaped at Natalie.  Someone was willing to pay a _hundred thousand dollars_ to have her killed?  What on earth for?

Honesty compels me to admit that for a moment I considered what I could do with a hundred thousand tax-free dollars. A new car.  A down payment on a house.  Maybe even visit Hawaii, like I'd been wanting for the past decade.  A vision of delightful beachside escapades filled my imagination and for a moment I was caught up in the wonder.

Then I remembered that I'd have to kill someone to get the money.  Seeing as the only way I managed to eat meat was to pretend it grew on trees, prewrapped in Styrofoam and plastic, there was just no way I was going to manage to murder another human being, even one who'd stolen my car.

While I was flirting with temptation, Natalie had continued her attempts to talk Bishop into not killing her.  As she talked, I saw her hand twitching in the direction of the trees, almost as if she was telling me to try to move closer to cover.  Since I couldn't move further without drawing unwanted attention, I focused on her knees instead.  Even with the surreptitious shuffling she'd been doing, Natalie was still several feet further from the trees than I was; she was going to have to run or jump to make it to the jungle without being shot.

"I'm very sorry, Natalie," Bishop said to the latest argument, which sounded suspiciously like Natalie bought information from people in law enforcement, which I certainly hoped wasn't true.  "I hate to rush a woman's death, especially a woman as beautiful as you, but my special friends can only delay so long."

_Special friends?_   I had a brief, somewhat disturbing mental image of Bishop spending time with his "special friends".  There was a lot of leather involved.

"You don't really think your pet policemen can cover up a murder, do you?" Natalie asked.

"I'll make sure they're motivated," Bishop said, sliding his gun off his shoulder.

Just before the gun cleared Bishop's hand, Natalie's knees bent sharply and she shouted, " _Now!_ "

I was moving before she finished the word, very nearly tripping as I plowed through the thick underbrush.  Gunfire rattled and behind me I could hear Natalie let out a pained grunt, but she couldn't have been hurt too badly because she caught up with me a second later and grabbed my arm.  "Keep low and don't stop," she hissed.

I rolled my eyes but didn't say anything as I was already out of breath, even though we were just a few feet into the jungle.  My recently purchased slip-on sandals looked stylish and were surprisingly comfortable, but they were emphatically not made for running, much less running through swampy land covered with a netting of exposed roots.  I stumbled several times and if Natalie and her terribly practical army boots hadn't slowed down to offer unwanted help, she could have easily left me behind. 

When we'd gone what felt like a mile but was probably less than a quarter of that, I hit a puddle of slime and managed one of the most impressive, cartoon-like falls of my life: my arms flew out to the side, my feet sailed up into the air, and I slammed down to the earth on my back, breathless, stunned, and in considerable pain.  As I stared up at the bits of sunlight flickering through the overhead canopy, with slime soaking through my favorite suit and my face hot with exertion and embarrassment, it occurred to me there were worse things in life than being shot.

Natalie crouched down next to me, no more out of breath than if she'd been taking a stroll to the corner store, and patted my knee.  "You okay?" she whispered, sounding concerned.

I huffed in irritation, but said, "yes," because, humiliation aside, I was. 

Natalie nodded and stood back up with an unconscious ease I hadn't managed in over a decade.  She tentatively held out her hand to help me up and, unlike all of the other silent offers she'd made in our mad dash, I accepted her assistance.  Between the two of us we managed to get me to my feet.  The moment I was standing, however, I slipped again and only stayed upright by dint of clinging to Natalie.

For a second we just stood there, a mud-soaked tableau that could've been titled Handsome Heroine Rescuing Falling Girl.  Natalie's arms were like bands of steel as they held me up and I was suddenly very aware of my breasts smashed up against hers.  She still smelled wonderful.  An incredibly inappropriately-timed warmth spread through my body and for a moment I closed my eyes and let myself feel.

Then Natalie whispered, "All right?" and I reluctantly reminded myself that we were running for our lives here.  Except ... "I don't hear any shots," I murmured back.

"They stopped a while ago," Natalie confirmed.  "Probably got word that the police were on their way."

I sighed and reluctantly pulled my nose out of Natalie's neck, using her for balance as I carefully slid my feet back under me.  "You want me to carry you?" she offered as my feet promptly tried to skid in opposite directions.

I snorted.  "Please.  I must outweigh you by a hundred pounds."  Which was an exaggeration, but not by much.  "Just let me hold your arm," I added and proceeded to slide my feet forward as if I was ice skating through the goo.  Next to me Natalie -- and her damned army boots -- strode along with ease and a small part of me wondered if it would be wrong to knock her out and steal her footwear.

Once we achieved the endless three feet that it took to get us to the other side of the puddle, I let go of Natalie and flopped back against the nearest tree.  "Okay," I said, feeling utterly drained.  "Now what?"

Natalie leaned back against a tree opposite me and shoved her hands in her pockets.  "Now we wait."

"Wait?  For what?"

"For morning."

"For _morning?_ "

"Well, two or three in the morning, anyway.  There's some vacation homes about a quarter-mile to the north; once everyone's asleep we'll see if we can't steal a boat."

I considered protesting stealing a boat, dismissed the urge as stupid, and instead asked, "Won't Bishop be anticipating that?"

"Probably.  With any luck the boat we steal will be his."

"Your plan is underwhelming," I said flatly.

"You have a better one?"

I thought about it, but apparently the scenario-making part of my brain choked when it came to actually experiencing life-or-death situations.  "Any chance we can just go to the police?" I asked hopefully.

"I wouldn't risk it.  Bishop's got at least one guy in the Monroe County sheriff's department and possibly someone else in the coast guard."

Which undoubtedly sucked for Natalie, but:  "There's not a contract out on _my_ life."  Natalie didn't say anything.  "Is there?" I added suspiciously, wondering when that could have possibly happened.

"Probably not," she admitted.  "But if your registration's in your car they've probably already got your name and address."  She sighed.  "Janet – "

"Heather," I interrupted.

Natalie blinked.  "What?"

"My name's Heather.  If we're going to be shot at together, you might as well know my real name."

"Right."  She smiled.  "Nice to meet you, Heather."

I thought about making a sarcastic comment in reply, but I couldn't bring myself to be that rude.  Not when she had that slightly impressed look in her eye.  Not when she was being so nice to me.  "Likewise," I said, and was surprised to find I had a smile in me after all.

~~~

We managed to find a relatively dry place to sit and wait, but my suit was already soaked in sweat and muck and I was offending myself with my body odor.  It didn't help that the little island of dryness we'd found appeared to mostly consist of an odd-looking network of above-ground tree roots and the detritus that had been caught up in the root cage.  The decaying vegetation was wafting out sulfur compounds that mixed with the heavy humidity to create a tangible, choking stench of rotten eggs.

Natalie stretched, winced, and rolled up her sleeve, revealing a nasty-looking cut just below her shoulder.  I whistled.  "That's gotta hurt."

"It's fine," Natalie said.  "Not even bleeding."

"Not bleeding _anymore_ , you mean," I said, shifting closer.  "Is that a gunshot?"

"Just a graze."

I rolled my eyes.  "Yeah, you're a badass."  I shrugged off my suit jacket.

"What're you doing?" Natalie asked suspiciously.

"It's probably already infected," I said as I jerked on the sleeve.  It didn't tear.  I jerked again and thought longingly of my pocketknife, which was presumably still dangling from my car's ignition along with my keys.  "Still, no point in getting it any worse."  I scowled at the tight, evenly spaced stitching on the shoulder joint of the sleeve.  It didn't even look strained by my tugging.  With an irritated huff, I bit into the fabric; all I needed was a tiny tear to get started.

"Maybe this'll help," Natalie said.  I looked up at her, my mouth full of grey cotton, and found her holding up a switchblade.

I self-consciously spat out the fabric and took the knife.  "Thanks," I muttered as I turned it over in my hands.  It looked like something a hunter would carry: the hilt was made of functional black molded plastic and the blade looked to be at least four inches long. 

Being careful to ensure that my hand was out of the way of the blade, I pushed the silver button on the side and the knife flipped open.  I nearly dropped it in surprise; the force of the spring pushing out the blade was unexpectedly powerful and the four inches of steel looked even longer now that I could see its razor sharp edge.

It didn't help that Natalie looked amused by my surprise.

Ducking my head over the sleeve, I tried to make my voice sound casual as I asked, "Did you have this the whole time?"

"Yes," Natalie said.

The knife cut through the stitches like they were made of butter.  "Even when I was threatening you with the tire iron?"

"Um… "

I growled.  "Don't lie to me." 

A beat.  "Sorry."

I sighed.  "No, I'm sorry.  It's just ... it's been a long day."  I laughed hollowly.

"I know it has," Natalie said in a soothing voice, shifting around so she was crouching down in front of me with her feet on the swampy ground below the roots.  From that position she could see my face even when I had it ducked down and I blinked a few times until the stinging in my eyes had gone away.  "You've done great today," she said, reaching up to tuck a chunk of hair behind my ear, and there was that stinging again.  This time blinking didn't do much good, and a few tears trickled over.  "Oh, Heather," she murmured gently as she leaned up and hugged me.

I've never known how to react to being hugged.  My dad wasn't a big hugger and, thanks to a custody agreement worked out when I was three, my sister Blythe and I spent half of each year with him for most of my childhood.  The fact that Blythe, despite being vastly more social than I am, is just as uncomfortable with hugs is some consolation, but it wasn't much help now as I sat awkwardly in Natalie's arms, wondering exactly how I was supposed to respond.

On the plus side, I was feeling too awkward to cry anymore.

After a few moments Natalie loosened her embrace, but she moved her hands to my shoulders and held on as she leaned back.  "You okay?"

I sniffed and wished I had a tissue.  "Fine.  Let me see your arm."

Natalie looked a little confused, but she just said, "Okay," and sat back down next to me.  I quickly cut my sleeve into strips and did my best to tie them around her arm so that she wouldn't lose circulation.

During all of this, Natalie kept watching me, which just made me feel even more awkward.  When I was done, she merely said, "Thanks.  Are you sure you're okay?"

"I'm _fine_ ," I ground out.  I hated feeling socially adrift and had worked hard to develop the social skills necessary for most day-to-day interactions.  Unfortunately, "on the run with a sympathetic kidnapper" wasn't a situation I'd had the opportunity to practice and I found myself feeling as hopelessly ill-equipped as I had back in middle school.  A little desperate, I changed the subject to the first thing I could think of: "What kind of tree is this, anyway?  It doesn't look like a cypress, but I've never seen any other kind of tree growing in a swamp."

Natalie lifted her eyebrows slightly, but settled back against the tree trunk and agreeably began a discourse on the mangrove tree, which was apparently the most common type of tree in the Florida Keys.  The longer she stayed off the subject of how I was feeling, the more I relaxed and by the time she got around to explaining how a rubbish heap could smell like rotten eggs I felt composed enough to cut in with, "Trust me, I've smelled sulfur before.  You think this smells bad, you should try a natural hot spring."

"Oh, I have," Natalie said, laughing.  "Smelly, but worth it."  She waggled her eyebrows and shot me an exaggerated leer.

I rolled my eyes, then sighed.  "Actually, I wish we had a hot spring here.  Sulfur was one of the first antibiotics; it'd probably do your shoulder some good."

"I didn't know that," Natalie said, sounding intrigued.  "Let me guess: you're a doctor."

I let out an incredulous laugh.  "No.  I'm a secretary.  But I have a degree in chemistry."  _Stop there, stop there_ , I told myself, but the rest just rolled off my tongue, "With a second major in math.  And another degree in English."

Natalie rolled her head to the side so she could look at me without lifting her head from the tree.  "That sounds a bit overqualified for a secretary."

"Yeah, well, I wasn't very good at math or chemistry," I said, mentally kicking myself for bringing them up at all.  I was thirty-one years old for God's sake, old enough to know better.  "And there's not much you can do with an English degree."

"I'm pretty sure you have to be better than 'not very good' to get a degree."

I just shrugged, not wanting to get into it.  "How about you?  What did you major in?"

Natalie turned her head away again.  "Nothing," she said in a voice that sounded just a little too deliberately casual considering how tense her shoulders were.  "I didn't go to college."

Now it was my turn to be surprised.  "You're an information broker and you didn't go to college?"

She laughed and some of the tension bled out of her body.  "Trust me, the stuff you learn in school is not what they're coming to me for."

I felt my cheeks burn.  "Right, of course."

"Looking back, I think I would've liked to go," Natalie said, sounding a little wistful.  "Maybe I could've pulled it off if I'd figured that out a few years earlier.  But I didn't," she sighed.  "And by the time I graduated high school my grades just weren't good enough for a scholarship."

"Couldn't your parents help?"

She laughed, but without humor.  "No."

_Okay._   Unable to think of any way to continue that line of questioning without coming across as pushy, I changed the subject.  "My sister didn't actually go to college either.  Well, not out of high school.  Right now she's working on an audio engineering degree."  When Natalie merely nodded, I kept on rambling:  "Actually, she joined the Ren Faire circuit after high school."

Natalie perked up at that.  "Your sister worked Renaissance Faires?  Which ones?"

Her knowledge was a pleasant surprise.  Usually when telling people about my sister I had to explain what a Renaissance Faire was: semi-accurate reenactments of a nebulous time in European history tended to cater to a niche crowd.  That said, there were a lot of the faires around the country; I wasn't sure I could name all of the ones Blythe had worked at.  "She started in Pennsylvania and did that for a few years."

Natalie looked unimpressed.  "That one's usually done by locals; no one wants to spend eleven weeks at the same faire."

"That's true," I said suspiciously.  "How did you know that?"

"Wench Natalie at your service, mi'lady," Natalie said in an execrable faux-old-English accent.  She offered a seated bow that wasn't much better.

"Apparently I should be asking you what faires you worked."

She smirked.  "I started in Arizona."

"Small world," I murmured.  Blythe had worked that faire, too.

"I guess," Natalie said with a shrug.  "Most of the kids I met on the circuit were either taking a break before school or had opted out of college altogether.  It's a good way to find yourself while traveling the country and it attracts a lot of free spirits."

"Plus they throw a killer party," I said dryly.

"You've heard of the Funky Formal," Natalie said, and now she definitely sounded impressed.

"I've even been to one," I told her archly.

"Not the one in Scarborough.  I would've seen you there."

"From what I've heard of the Scarborough Faire, you'd be lucky to find your own mother unless you knew she was there.  No, I was in Georgia a few years ago and just happened to visit my sister at the right time.  She dragged me along."  I smiled at the memory.  "She had strict instructions to get me drunk."

"Really?  Why?"

I let out a self-conscious laugh and shook my head.  "Because I was going through a phase where I wanted to try everything once.  I'd already gotten a coworker to teach me how to shoot and a friend to take me to a strip club and I decided that it was time to see what it felt like to be drunk."

"And what did it feel like?"

"No clue," I admitted.  "It took me two hours to finish a half a daiquiri and after that we just gave up."  I wrinkled my nose.  "Alcohol tastes _nasty_."

"You get used to the taste."

"So I've heard.  But my dad was an alcoholic and I figured in the long run it was better to just keep hating alcohol than it was to tempt fate."

"Fair enough."

We sat in silence for a few minutes and I thought over everything I'd just told Natalie.  None of it was anything I was ashamed of, but it was still quite a bit more than I usually told someone within a few hours of meeting her.  "You know, you're very easy to talk to."

"Trick of the trade," she drawled.

"I wish I could learn that trick," I said, staring up into the trees.  The light was getting even dimmer and the top of the canopy was now lost in shadows.  I shivered.

"Cold?" Natalie asked quietly. 

"A little," I answered, just as softly.  "Mostly because I'm wet."

She laughed lightly and held out her arm.  I looked at her in surprise.  "I don't want to get _you_ wet."

"It's just a little water."

"And mud.  And slime.  And at _least_ one compound containing sulfur, not to mention – "

"Heather."

I stopped babbling and took a deep breath.  "Hm?"

"We're just sharing some body heat," she said gently.  "I'm getting chilly, too."

Just sharing body heat.  Like it's something that complete strangers do all the time.  I thought about telling her that no one had ever even offered to loan me a jacket before, much less body heat.  Deciding that that would be too pathetic, I just scooted over silently and let her wrap her arm around me.

She didn't feel cold.  Not at all.  Especially not when she rubbed her hand up and down my arm a few times, leaving a tantalizing trail of warmth in its wake.

"Is that better?" she asked.

I made a small noise that might have been an affirmative.

She chuckled, deep in her throat, and I felt a sharp spear of _something_ deep in my belly.  "You can relax, you know.  I won't bite."

I hadn't even realized how rigidly I was holding myself until she mentioned it.  Warily, I let my spine loosen a bit, until I was pressed against her side.  Unlike the few times I'd tried this before, it actually felt comfortable leaning against her.  It felt even more so when she nudged my head until I rested it in the hollow of her shoulder.

"You should try to get some sleep," she murmured.  "It might be the last chance for a while."

"I'm okay," I said, though I had to admit that all of the running and panicking and injuries were starting to catch up with me.  Natalie just hummed at me; with my ear resting on her body, it sounded like a soothing rumble.  Before I was aware what was happening, I was asleep.


	3. Chapter 3

Something was tickling my arm.  It was really annoying, because aside from that tickle I was warm and relaxed and feeling wonderfully safe.  Still, that tickling on my arm was irritating, especially as it wasn't staying still but was instead moving down my wrist sort of like it was being caused by a ...

My eyes snapped open to find the largest damn roach I'd ever seen crawling over my hand.

At this point I want to make it clear that I'm not a girly woman.  I don't like jewelry, I hate shopping, I own the absolute bare minimum number of pairs of dress shoes necessary to meet social expectations (two, though after I throw out my wretched new sandals I'll be back down to one), I don't cling to the nearest warm body when watching a scary movie, I enjoy traveling alone, and it doesn't even occur to me to be afraid to walk around outside at night, even in bad neighborhoods.  I'm confident -- maybe overconfident -- in my ability to protect myself from anyone and anything that can cause me actual physical harm.

That said, I'm afraid of bugs.  It's irrational, I know.  It's not like this roach was going to bite me like a snake might, and I'm not afraid of snakes.  Heck, I'm not even afraid of spiders and they _look_ like bugs. 

Get me near a roach, however, and I always react the same way.  This time was no exception.

I _shrieked_.

Natalie started awake, just in time to get smacked in the face as I started flailing my arms.  "What the – " she mumbled sleepily.  "Heather?"

I whimpered and rubbed the offended forearm and hand against my pants, even though the roach was long gone and my pants were indescribably filthy.

"Heather?  What – "  Natalie rubbed her eyes and looked around, presumably taking in the thick fog and the early morning light.  "What's wrong?" she finally asked, sounding baffled.

"Roach," I squeaked, my voice still trembling a bit.  My heart was pounding in my chest like a jackhammer and I felt like my arm would never be clean again.  Certainly its new layer of muck wasn't helping.

Natalie looked flabbergasted.  "A roach?"

I nodded frantically.  "On my arm."

She frowned and pulled her arm back from around my shoulders.  I immediately felt colder, not to mention more than a little foolish.  With an effort I managed to stop rubbing my arm against my pants, though I kept clenching my hand in a fist in an attempt to get rid of the willies.

A _roach_ had been on my _arm_.  I wanted to hurl.

Natalie rubbed her face.  "Let me get this straight.  Yesterday you got blown up, carjacked, kidnapped, and shot at, and you barely batted an eye.  This morning you see a water bug and you get hysterical?"

"I hate roaches," I muttered and quickly rubbed my arm one more time.  Just to be sure.

"Then you probably shouldn't have moved to Florida," Natalie pointed out, a tiny quaver in her voice that sounded suspiciously like barely stifled laughter.

I glared at her.  "Look, I know it's stupid to be scared of bugs.  That doesn't stop it from being true."  Scared, ha.  Try terrified.  There was one time when I found a roach in my college dorm room I'd been so freaked out that I went to stay at my mom's place for a couple of days, giving the roach time to disappear on its own.

Natalie held her hands up.  "Not judging.  I've got a thing about heights."

I thawed a bit.  "Heights?"

"Oh yeah.  Terrified of them, to the point I have to be sedated when I fly.  Why do you think I live in a state without any mountains?"

"Because of the droves of women in bikinis?" I suggested wryly.  My spine began to unclench.

"Just a perk.  But a very nice one."

I stuck my tongue out at her.  I'm really too old for the gesture, but I haven't quite managed to eradicate it entirely from my mannerisms.  Then I remembered something: "Wait, I thought you said you were going to fly out of here on Bishop's plane."

"I was," Natalie said, losing much of her joviality.  "Best of bad options.  Though it does help that Bishop trains his pilots to fly below radar."

"Ah," I said, personally appalled at the idea of flying in a plane that was deliberately trying to stay within easy crashing distance of the ground.  Deciding that it was time for a subject change, I asked, "Weren't we supposed to be sneaking about at three?  Because I'm pretty sure it's later than that now."

"It is," Natalie said, turning serious.  "This might work out for the best, though; fog will hide us nearly as well as the dark and it's a lot easier to move around in."

"If you say so.  I have to admit, I'm totally lost."

"I'm not," Natalie said with reassuring confidence.  "Come on, we're not far."

Lacking any better options, I followed her.

As we trudged through the woods, I thought about the fact that it was Tuesday.  A work day.  And, unless my circumstances miraculously changed in the next couple of hours, I wasn't going to be able to call in, much less show up for my shift.  Which meant that when I finally did make it back to civilization -- _if_ I made it back to civilization -- I could very well be fired.  Again, damn it.  Though at least this time I'd be fired for something I did wrong, rather than because I didn't have the social skills necessary to effectively suck up to my boss.

"You're being awfully quiet."

I glanced up to find Natalie staring at me with a worried expression.  "Sorry," I said, "just thinking about how I'm probably going to get fired today.  That'll make three."

"Three?"

"Three jobs out of five that I've gotten fired from."  Put that way, it sounded pretty bad. 

Natalie just stared at me some more.  Flushing, I quickly added, "I tend to zone out on random thoughts when I'm walking.  Which is one of the reasons why I walk so much."  When Natalie didn't immediately say anything, I let out a self-conscious laugh, "I know, I know, it's hard to believe I do any exercise at all, right?"

"No," Natalie said, sounding thoughtful.  "I was actually thinking that was why you hadn't started complaining yet about being tired.  We can take a break if you need one, you know."

I shrugged to hide the wash of pleasure her words gave me.  "It's okay, I don't really need breaks."  I thumped myself on the chest.  "Good German farming stock."

Natalie raised her eyebrows as she turned to keep leading the way.  "German farming stock?"

"Well, on my mom's side.  My dad was more of a Heinz 57."

"And what does German farming stock have to do with not needing breaks?"

"Well," I said, carefully stepping over a particularly knotted bunch of roots, "most of my relatives look like me: relatively short, stubby fingers, very overweight.  So when my Uncle Doug – who's shorter than I am and has to weigh at least three hundred pounds – volunteered to go on a hike with me, I planned a lot of breaks, especially when he showed up for the hike in deck loafers."  Natalie glanced back as if checking to see if she heard that right and I shrugged and nodded.  "So after hiking for a half mile or so, I called a break even though I didn't need one.  After a minute or so, my uncle asked if I was "done with my break" and he sounded a little annoyed at how wussy I was being.  That was the only break we took.  By the end of the hike my knees felt like jello from going straight up the mountain and then straight back down again, but Uncle Doug hadn't even broken a sweat."

Natalie laughed.  "Sounds like a character."

"He certainly is something," I said neutrally.  Now certainly wasn't the time to discuss just how close Uncle Doug liked to get to his nieces.  "How about your family?"

"Oh, we're mutts," Natalie said.  "I don't see them much."

I huffed in annoyance as she stopped without explaining further, and viciously kicked a dwarf palmetto in lieu of kicking her.  Unfortunately that sent my sandal flying over Natalie's shoulder, just barely missing taking off her ear. Natalie stumbled to the side, looking startled, then turned around.  " … Everything okay back there?"

"Just peachy," I muttered, trying to hop on one foot over to my sandal.  As it turned out, however, hopping around in slip-on sandals was a very Bad Idea, and it took less than three jumps for me to lose my balance and fall into a mud puddle.

Natalie crouched down next to me, looking torn between concern and amusement.  At that moment I hated her, just a little.  "You okay?" she asked again, her voice shaking with barely repressed laughter.

"I'm fine," I said, heaving an annoyed sigh.  Natalie held out a hand and I seriously considered taking it and pulling her down in the mud with me.  In the end I chickened out and let her haul me up.  I drew the line at her wiping mud off my back, though, and smacked her hands away when she tried.

Natalie retrieved my sandal for me and handed it over with a conciliatory expression.  "I know it's been a long couple of days and that you're tired and hungry.  It'll be over soon, though, I promise."

As a matter of fact and more than anything else, I was _thirsty_.  Desperately so.  I'd been trying very hard not to think about it as we walked, but now that I'd acknowledged it to myself I could no longer ignore the way my tongue felt thick and tacky or the way my throat was getting sore with dryness.  At that moment I would've gratefully given one of my pinkies for a glass of water.

_Water, water, everywhere,_ I thought to myself as I squelched through yet another, inevitably salty and probably toxic, puddle.  _And not a drop to drink._

I don't know how much further we walked -- probably not that long if Natalie's estimate of the entire walk being less than half a mile was accurate, though it felt longer than that -- but the fog was starting to thin a bit when Natalie finally held up her hand and whispered, "We're almost there."

I just nodded in reply, too thirsty and miserable to attempt speaking.  Natalie eyed me carefully.  "Sure you're okay?" she murmured.

"Fine," I gritted out, wishing she would stop asking me that.  No way was I going to be the first one to crack, even if I was the one wearing the uncomfortable dress clothes and completely inappropriate shoes.

"If you say so," Natalie said softly, sounding anything but convinced.  "I want you to stay here while I check out the houses.  It's the off-season in the Keys; maybe we'll get lucky and find an empty one."

I just nodded wearily and looked around for a stump I could sit on while I waited for her to come back.

Except that she didn't come back.  At first I just figured she was scouting the houses and boats.  That seemed to take forever, but my time judgment was probably off due to the extreme circumstances and the fact that I really, really wanted something to drink.  Then I wondered if maybe she thought I'd just be safer here if she left me behind while she drew away the bad guys. 

Or maybe she'd just left me behind, full stop.

"Fuck that," I muttered to myself, feeling like a complete idiot for trusting her in the first place.  She'd carjacked me and thrown me in my own trunk.  She had a price on her head.She worked with _drug dealers_.  What on earth had possessed me to believe her?

Full of spit and vinegar and righteous indignation, I stomped off in the direction that Natalie had left in, hoping that it was a straight shot to the houses.  If not I was in trouble, as I was absolutely lost.  Frankly, I wasn't even sure which island I was on, much less how big it was or where I was relative to the road and the ocean.

I got lucky, though, and within a hundred feet found myself standing on the edge of an overgrown lawn.  Across from me was a small but expensive-looking white house full of windows that would likely shatter in the next hurricane.  It was ostensibly standing on stilts, but plywood had been hung from the house's wooden legs, resulting in a bottom floor that was in complete violation of building codes in the Keys.  Through a crude window made of little more than screening stapled over a hole in the plywood, I caught a glimpse of what was probably a children's playroom. 

Above that room was the real first floor of the house, with a giant bay window facing out into the jungle.  Shadows moved behind glass, barely visible in the glare of the early morning sun.

Suddenly one of the shadows moved closer to the window and coalesced into a distinctly human shape.  As the person approached, he shifted a little bit and a long, narrow shape stood out from his body.

I jerked behind a tree.  Machine gun.  The guy was carrying a fucking machine gun.  Fuck.

I had no idea what to do now.  I couldn't call the police, even if my cell phone hadn't been lost in the explosion, because I didn't know which policemen I could trust.  I couldn't let myself be caught because the only reason I could figure that Natalie might still be alive was the fact that the bad guys hadn't found me yet.  I couldn't run away and abandon Natalie because ... because ... because I just couldn't.  No matter how much sense it made, no matter that it was probably the only way I would survive this mess, I just couldn't.  The very idea made me want to be sick.

Which meant I had to rescue Natalie.  From bad men with big guns.  

Damn it.  I was in so far over my head, I couldn't even imagine a way out.

Taking a deep breath, I reminded myself that I was intelligent, reasonably athletic, and, most importantly, had the element of surprise.  I could do this.  Somehow.

First of all, I needed information.  There was at least one person with a gun in the house.  It was possible that these people weren't with Bishop but the very idea that there were _two_ groups of mercenaries with machine guns after us was too depressing to contemplate, so I decided to work on the assumption that the current bad guys were Bishop and his four goons.  Bishop and Natalie probably weren't in the room with the giant window, though; if I had to guess I'd bet both of them were in an interior room with another guard, to make escape and/or rescue as difficult as possible.

Which left at least three armed guards.  Since the one in the window had a clear view of the lawn, I figured there was probably at least one guard on the other side of the house.  As for the last guard, who knew?  Maybe he was the other shadow I'd seen behind the window.  Or maybe that other shadow was actually a piece of furniture and the last guard was out patrolling the woods.  Actually that made a lot of sense, though with my luck he was probably standing behind me, ready to pounce.

My spine sprouted goose bumps at the thought and I spun around, expecting to find myself looking down the barrel of a very big gun.

No one there.

Taking a couple of gasping breaths, I called myself eighteen kinds of fool.  At this rate I was going to give myself a heart attack before I even managed to find the first bad guy.

Once I got myself under control, I stole one last look at the window above me and then eased back far enough in the woods that I was sure I couldn't be seen from the house.  Then I started moving around to the right, where I'd thought I'd seen a glimpse of a driveway through a poorly-maintained flower garden.  If nothing else, maybe I could disable their transportation; at least then they couldn't take Natalie away.

The next few minutes were a living nightmare.  While there weren't any dry twigs for me to step on, the jungle was full of dead palm leaves, chattering bugs, and overgrown ground plants and every step I took filled the air with the sound of rustling leaves overlaid with the rubbing sandpaper rasp of my breath.  At any moment I expected a bad guy to jump out at me and laugh at my pathetic attempts at quiet.

Against all odds, I made it to the driveway in one piece, though my hands were shaking with adrenaline, my body was once again dripping sweat, and my tongue felt like a dead slug swelling up in my mouth.  For a long moment I seriously contemplated the possibility of running down that driveway to the main road and taking my chances with a random motorist. 

The thought of Natalie all alone in a sea of bad guys, possibly being tortured or worse, forced my hand.  Reminding myself that there were plenty worse things than death, I stuck my head out from between the trees and took a quick glance up and down the road.  Nothing up at the house.  Down towards the highway was a cranberry red Saturn Ion with ridiculous looking grey accents just over the windows and two bullet holes in the windshield.

I gasped in indignation.  That was _my_ car.  Those bastards were chasing me and Natalie in _my car_.

Too annoyed to be scared now, I shot a quick look at the house to make sure there was no one watching, then scurried out into the road and down to my car.  To my eternal annoyance, the doors were _unlocked_ , which was quite possibly the first time in the decade and a half that I owned the vehicle that it stood unlocked without a person sitting inside of it.  Bastards.

Still, it did make my life easier.  I eased open the door and crouched down behind it.  From there I could reach the tiny nook under the steering wheel where I kept the low-end GPS my mom had given me when she'd upgraded, as well as the larger cousin to the pocketknife I'd kept on my key ring.  To the left of the steering wheel was another little cranny where I kept my hair ties; I grabbed a couple of those and then lifted up the piece of plastic that lined the tiny space and pulled out the twenty dollar bill I had stashed there for emergencies.  Finally I reached over to the gap between the two front seats and groped around until I found the hammer I kept within easy reach of the front seat.  Safer than a butcher's knife and, unlike a handgun, legal in all fifty states, I'd been carrying a hammer in my car ever since I went on the road for the first time.  Admittedly I'd never actually used the hammer for anything aside from its manufacturer-intended purpose, but at the moment I was really glad I had it on hand.

Okay, I was armed and I had some basic supplies.  Now all I needed was a plan and, with any luck, some water. 

I froze. 

In point of fact I always kept some water in my trunk.  A whole gallon of sweet spring water that was currently calling out to me like a siren.

_You don't need it_ , I told myself firmly.  _It's not like the hammer, it's not going to help you save Natalie.  You can get a drink after._  

My dry throat and swollen tongue disagreed.  The trunk release button was right next to the steering wheel, after all; my ear was brushing up against it.  What harm could it do to take a second longer to open the trunk and slake a thirst that had grown positively painful over the last few hours?

For a few seconds I waged a quick but fierce internal battle and, as was often the case, my immediate craving won out over long-term prudence.  The trunk obediently popped open at the press of the release button and, shooting one last quick glance at the house, I scuttled around to the back of the car and lifted the trunk lid just enough to slide my upper body inside and grab the water.

Once that cool plastic handle was within my grasp I lost all sense of reason.  I didn't even bother to pull back out of the trunk, I just scrabbled at the plastic tab holding down the lid, fumbling in my impatience and eventually ripping both the tab and the lid off simultaneously.  The moment they were gone I jerked the jug towards me and gulped down a few swallows of liquid heaven as it gushed out to soak the bottom of the trunk.

Once my initial thirst was satisfied I slowed down, registering for the first time that the water was heavily flavored with the unpleasant taste of plastic.  Not unpleasant enough to make me stop, however, and after readjusting the position of the jug so that the water flow was more controlled, I kept on drinking until I felt something that made me stop mid-swallow.  Something that felt cool and very hard and suspiciously like the barrel of a gun pressed right at the base of my spine.


	4. Chapter 4

"Out," a gravelly voice said.

I didn't move.  I _couldn't_ move.  My whole body had frozen in shock and sheer terror.

" _Out_ ," the man said again, emphasizing his words by nudging me with the gun.

The metallic jab jolted me back into action.  I looked desperately at the half-empty jug of water in my hand, and then at the hammer that was currently resting under my stomach.  Neither seemed a viable weapon against a man with a machine gun.

Then my eyes caught on the other jug, this one of windshield washer fluid.  A plan started forming itself in my mind.

Snagging the washer fluid, I made quick work of the childproof cap, backing out of the trunk slowly at the same time.  The moment I had the lid off, I took it in my right hand and grabbed the handle of my hammer with my left. 

Shoving off with my hammer-hand I stood up, opening the trunk lid fully in the process, and used my right hand to jerk the jug in my hand at the bad guy's face.

A blob of purple fluid shot out of the jug ... and fell straight to the ground.  The bad guy and I stared at the tiny purple patch in the white clay-mud of the driveway and I mentally cursed my incompetent high school physics teacher, who had clearly not given me nearly enough of an understanding of fluid dynamics.

The goon made a noise that sounded like an overloaded freight train and it took me a minute to realize that he was laughing.  _Laughing_.  At me.  Laughing so hard, in fact, that he dropped his gun so that it hung down from his arm on its strap, and clutched his belly with his hands.

The moment the gun was out of his hands, I dropped the windshield washer fluid, picked my left hand up from where it was still hidden in the trunk, transferred the hammer to my right hand, and slammed it down on the goon's head.

The laughter cut off abruptly.  A second later the goon slumped down to the ground, not moving in the slightest.

_Oh, shit!_

I hovered there for a minute, two minutes, too damn long because there were other bad guys around and any one of them could come out at any time, but I just couldn't do anything because I might've just killed another human being and ... oh, _shit_!

I don't know how long I would have stood there, freaking out, if the human being in question hadn't groaned.

Gasping in relief and with legs suddenly too weak to hold me up, I stumbled back against the car.  For a few moments all I could do was stare and freak out just like all of those stupid women in movies who freeze up at the absolute worst possible moment and get themselves and everyone they care about killed.

Out of all of the reasons why I had to get a hold of myself -- to save Natalie, to save _myself_ \-- it was that thought, the thought of being a stereotypically stupid, hysterical damsel in distress that finally got my ass in gear.

Hauling a two hundred and fifty pound man into the trunk of my car wasn't easy, but I had plenty of weight to act as a counterbalance and I wasn't particularly worried about the guy's comfort, and in the end I got it done.  That left me with a half-gallon of water, a pocketknife, a hammer, a machine gun that I didn't know how to use, and at least four more bad guys somewhere on the premises.

Then it occurred to me that I was being an idiot.  I reopened the trunk of my car and patted down the semi-conscious bad guy.  Sure enough, he had a cell phone in his pants pocket.  I jerked it out of his pocket hard enough to make fabric tear, and dialed 911.

" _911.  What's the nature of your emergency?_ "

After the last couple of days it didn't take any effort at all to burst into tears.  "I've been kidnapped!  Some guy carjacked me and he took me to this place, I think it's in the Keys, and there were four other guys there and they -- and they – "  I trailed off, so caught up in the act that I was actually hyperventilating.

"Ma'am, I know you're scared, but stay with me.  Is it safe for you to talk?"

I sniffled.  "I – I don't know.  I stole one of their phones while they ... and they said something about a 'shipment' and laughed and said they'd come back and – " I let out a little gasp.  "Oh my God, I think they're coming back.  Oh my God, oh my God.  Oh God, please hurry, they're coming!"

Before the operator could ask any more questions, I tossed the phone in the trunk of the car and slammed the lid down.  At the last moment I realized how stupid that was and thrust my hand between the lid and the base of the car and gritted my teeth against the shooting pain of impact.  It was my right hand, too -- seriously, I was not at my best.

Nothing to be done for it at the moment, though, except to gently push the lid down until it latched and to give the car one last quick check before closing the driver's side door.  I wasted a second to mourn my own cell phone, lost in the confusion back in Miami, and the fact that I had to leave the bad guy's phone behind to be traced by the cops, then painfully opened the largest blade on my pocketknife and punctured both tires on the driver's side of the car, which was a lot harder to do than I expected and not only because I was the one who was ultimately going to have to pay for new tires.

The essentials done, I hurried back into the woods and looked for a good place to wait. 

I figured there were two possible outcomes to the call I just made.  First, there was the possibility that the operator would only send out one car in response.  Whether the driver of that car was corrupt or not, Natalie and I would be screwed, because I honestly couldn't see Bishop backing down now, not with just a single police officer in his way or, worse, with no impediment other than a police officer that he'd already paid off.  Hopefully it wouldn't be an issue, however, as I had very carefully mentioned multiple bad guys as well as dropped the word "shipment", which had ominous connotations in areas rife with smuggling.

All of which would hopefully result in the second possibility: that the operator would send everything she had to come and rescue me, maybe even DEA or FBI agents.  If that was what was happening then Bishop should be getting a call at any minute, warning him that a cavalry of epic proportions was headed his way.  If that happened, then I planned to be ready for him.

If I'd had hours to look I might've found the perfect spot: someplace with a stump at just the right height, with plenty of cover that I could hide behind but still with a good view of the house, and hopefully relatively dry.  Not having the time to be picky, however, I had to settle for two out of three and soon enough I found myself lying flat on my stomach in one of the ubiquitous puddles, balancing the machine gun on the stump and trying to remember everything I knew about shooting guns bigger than a pistol.  Which, frankly, wasn't much.  I had a vague memory of someone, probably my dad, and I watching security video of a bank robbery on some crime show.  The robbers were carrying some sort of machine gun and they kept their arms on the top of the gun to, according to my dad, counteract the recoil of the gun.  With that in mind, I draped my left arm over the barrel of my own gun and tried very hard not to think about one of those other experiments in my "give everything a try phase", when I had my Uncle Martin show me how to shoot a rifle.  I'd done okay with the .22s, but when given a chance to try a higher caliber even the padded vest he'd given me wasn't enough to prevent my shoulder from bruising from the gun's recoil.  I can't even remember if hit the target with that rifle, but I still remember my shoulder aching for days afterwards. 

I was pretty sure the machine gun I was holding was a much higher caliber than a .22.  Even without taking my swollen right hand into account, this was going to hurt.

A sudden noise distracted me from my worries as the front door of the house burst open and two armed goons came through.  A moment later Natalie came stumbling out, her hands tied behind her back and a large bruise on the right side of her face.  I winced in sympathy, but kept on waiting.  A moment later I was rewarded when Bishop and the last goon came out, the latter politely closing the door behind him, forcing me to stifle a slightly hysterical giggle.

As the goons approached the car, they clearly saw the flattened tires, because they ran forward and then started squabbling between them.  Bishop came up with Natalie and inspected the tires for a moment before turning around and staring out into the woods.  I had to fight the urge to duck as his eyes passed over where I was hidden; as much as my lizard brain wanted to hide away, I knew that movement would make me much easier to spot in the shadows than staying still.

A very faint wailing sound wafted on the morning breeze; the far-off sound of sirens.  Bishop abruptly turned back to his men.  "Come on, we'll take the boat."

I swore under my breath; I'd completely forgotten there was a boat. 

Unable to think of anything else to do, I took a deep breath, prayed that the safety wasn't on and that the gun still had bullets, and fired in the space between the bad guys and the dock.

The recoil wasn't as bad as I feared: it was worse.  The gun felt like a hammer as it punched back into my arm and the fingers on my right hand instantly went numb.  Adding injury to injury, as sore as my right shoulder was, my left arm felt even worse, especially once the burning registered.  I ripped my arm off the hot barrel of the gun and found that I'd given myself a very nice barrel-shaped burn.  Lovely.

A second later the vegetation around me began exploding with bullets and I forgot all about my arm in my need to duck down and huddle behind my stump.  When it was safe to look back up again, the sirens sounded like they were right on top of us, Bishop and his men were shouting frantically at each other, and Natalie was nowhere in sight.

Feeling more than a little bit frantic myself, I searched the ground around Bishop's men anxiously, trying to find any trace of Natalie or, failing that, anything to reassure me that I hadn't shot her by accident.  The lack of blood on the ground was a hopeful sign, but I still --

"Holy shit, that _was_ you."

I started so hard at the voice that I fell over backwards, right into the mud puddle.  Of course.  Swearing under my breath I turned around to find Natalie standing over me, bruised, battered, and still tied up, but very much alive.  "Oh, God," I said, scrambling to my feet and wrapping my arms around her.  "You're still alive."

"Thanks to you," she said, and I released her quickly, stunned at my own audacity.  "Where'd you learn to shoot a machine gun, anyway?"

I laughed a little manically.  "Right here, actually.  Which is why I was so bad at it."  I decided _what the hell,_ and gave her another quick hug before letting her go and admitting, "I was sure I'd killed you."

"I'm very glad you didn't.  I promise to praise you more later, but right now we really need to get out of here."

I frowned at her even as I pulled out my pocketknife and turned her around so I could get at the plastic tie holding her hands together.  "Why?  The police are coming and while one or two of them might be bad, you can't tell me Bishop has the entire force on his payroll."

"Unfortunately, Bishop's probably not the only person trying to kill me.  And where did you get that knife, anyway?"

"Oh, this knife?" I asked, feeling a little smug as I folded it up.  "It was in my car."

"And the AK-47?"

Something in her tone of voice made me wary as I answered, "I took it off a bad guy."

"A bad guy," Natalie repeated and yeah, she was definitely suspicious.  "A highly trained bad guy that you somehow managed to beat up ... how?"

"I hit him in the head with my hammer," I said defensively, fully aware of how ridiculous it sounded.

Natalie's eyes swept down to my hammer, which was sitting on the ground next to the machine gun, then returned to mine.  "Hammer?"

"Also from my car.  I carry it for protection."  Natalie looked even more disbelieving, making me add, "What's wrong with you?  I just saved your life!"

"You certainly did.  And you did it so neatly, too."

"You've got to be kidding me," I exclaimed.  "Do you honestly think I'm some kind of, I don't know, mole?"

"I don't know," Natalie said, suddenly swooping down to the ground and coming up with the gun, which she proceeded to point at me.  "Are you?"

" _No!_ " 

"How can I be sure?" Natalie asked, sounding a little helpless.  "You look harmless enough, but the way you've been behaving … "

If looks could kill, she'd have withered on the spot.  "Then riddle me this, jackass: how exactly did I manage to weasel my way into your graces when _you_ were the one to carjack _me_?"

She opened her mouth, then closed it again in consternation.  "Ha!" I crowed as she lowered the gun.

"I'm sorry," she said quietly.

"Whatever," I said flatly.

We stood in silence that would've probably been awkward if I wasn't so pissed off.  As it was, Natalie was the one who spoke first.  "We need to go; the police are almost here."

I heaved a sigh, but leaned down to pick up my hammer as well as the water jug.  There was a bullet hole in the top half, but the bottom half was still full of water.  "Here," I muttered ungraciously.  "Drink this."

She looked surprised, but wasted no time in claiming the jug.  Latching her mouth right over one of the bullet holes, she sucked the remainder of the water down in three long gulps. 

Despite myself, I admired the way her throat looked when it was stretched out like that, and it took me a moment to remember to ask, "You're sure we can't go to the police?  They have a lot more resources than we do."

Natalie shook her head.  "Not until I can be sure of who to trust.  Out here we have a chance.  In a jail cell we're easy pickings for a bad cop."

I sighed and tried not to think about my grumbling stomach and aching feet as I nodded.  "What next, then?"

"Back to the original plan: we try to steal a boat."

At that moment the first patrol car raced up the driveway, coming to a halt just inches from my car trunk.  Thankfully the wailing siren stopped a second later and two officers jumped out, both male, both on the older side.  Natalie swore under her breath and tugged on my arm, but I shook my head and flapped my hand at her when she didn't let go.

As we watched, the officers called out, "Anyone here?"

A loud thumping sound came from the trunk of my car.  "You didn't," Natalie breathed.

I shrugged, feeling a surge of satisfaction through my residual annoyance as one of the officers pulled his gun and pointed it at the trunk.  The other one opened the passenger door and ending up having to lean all the way across the car to reach the trunk release button on the far side of the steering wheel.

The moment the latch released the trunk lid went flying open and the goon I'd hit sat bolt upright.  Even from where I was standing I could see a large red splotch on his face that had to be blood and I winced, feeling a little guilty.  "Hammer, huh?" Natalie murmured.

"I got lucky," I hissed back.

The police officer next the trunk held his gun on the thug for another few seconds before he dropped it.  My heart sank.  "Shit, Bruno, what's going on here?" the cop asked.

Bruno.  Of course his name was Bruno.

"Some fatso bitch got the jump on me," Bruno said as he hauled himself out of the trunk.  I winced at the words, but when Natalie rested a hand on my shoulder, I shrugged it off.  "Where's Bishop?" Bruno asked.

"Gone, if he knows what's good for him," the second officer said, coming up to join the others.  "We're going to have to arrest you, you know.  Every letter agency in the state is headed this way."

Bruno scowled.  "That bitch is probably still around here somewhere."

"Don't worry," the first cop said.  "We'll find her eventually.  It's a small island."

_Well_ , I thought to myself.  _That doesn't sound good._

"Now can we go?" Natalie whispered as Bruno turned around with poor grace and allowed himself to be cuffed.  "We don't want to be here when the rest of them come."

"Fine," I answered quietly.  As we started walking away from the house, I added, "But he's right, you know.  It is a small island."

"It certainly is," Natalie said.  "Fortunately we have an advantage."  Reaching into her pocket she pulled out a cell phone. 

I gaped at her.  "Where did you get that?"

"Lifted it off one of the guards before they cuffed me," Natalie said cheerfully.  She eyed me thoughtfully.  "How about you?  Find anything else useful in your car?"

"Just this," I said, pulling the GPS out of my pocket and handing it over.  The hair ties were already doing their job in holding my hair up in a ponytail and the money ... the money I'd keep to myself, at least for now.

Natalie grinned, looking ridiculously pleased by such a crummy GPS.  "Exactly what I needed," she said.  "Come on, let's find the ocean."

I groaned, but followed.


	5. Chapter 5

Finding the ocean turned out to be a lot easier than finding the house had been, mainly because it was bright enough out now that we could see where we were going and a little bit because the GPS turned out to have a map function, making it possible to tell exactly which way was the shortest distance to the sea. 

While walking through the thick underbrush -- still in my uncomfortable shoes and my smelly, stiff-with-dirt clothes -- I consoled myself with thoughts of a beautiful private beach, full of pure white sand and crystal clear water.  Stupid of me, of course; you'd think I'd never been to the Keys before. In all of the Keys connected by the highway, only two actually had sandy beaches and both of those beaches were located within sight of a major road.  The rest of the beaches were just like the one Natalie and I found an hour or so later: a strip of grass leading out from under the trees right up to the edge of the island, which consisted of a two-inch-tall mud cliff that went straight down into the ocean.  At least the water was clear and smooth as glass thanks to the miles of shallow waters that surrounded the Keys and deadened any potential wave action. Just below the surface I could easily see a field of sea grass covering the ocean floor, except for a few strips of clear sand that wove through the grass like a natural walkway.

A hint of a breeze pushed a wave of odor up from my shirt and over my face.  I grimaced and announced, "I'm going to take a swim."

Natalie was frowning at her stolen phone, but she glanced up to say, “Have fun.”

I hesitated.  “Want to join me?”

She shook her head.  “I’m going to call a friend, see if he can help us get out of this mess.  If nothing else, maybe we can lie low at his place until the heat dies down.”

Lying low sounded pretty damn nice, though I wasn’t sure how much faith I could put into some guy I’d never met.  Still, it wasn’t as if I had a better suggestion, so I managed a weak smile back before carefully stepping down into one of the areas that was clear of grass. 

I promptly made a face as, instead of sand, my feet encountered a slick, slimy clay.  This was why I stuck to Miami's beaches. 

Still, water was water and I waded out a couple hundred feet until the water was at least up to my knees.  Unable to wait any longer, I crouched down and scrubbed my face and arms, ripping off bandages as I went, rationalizing that the wounds had to have stopped bleeding by now and the salt water would be good for them.

Once my visible skin was relatively clean, I started wading again, intent on getting deep enough to soak my clothes.  As I walked, I passed a couple of fish and even a massive blue crab the size of a dinner plate.  I'm not a big seafood person, but hungry as I was, I was seriously considering the merits of crab legs when the crab suddenly moved.  _Towards me._

I'm ashamed to say it, but ... I panicked.  Quite loudly.  Flailing my arms and shrieking in terror, I ran back towards the shore, high stepping in an attempt to move faster.  Still on dry land I saw Natalie watching me, phone down by her side and mouth open as she gaped at me.

As I watched, she started laughing.

Eyes narrowed in indignation, I slowed down ...

… just to feel something brush against my foot.

I shrieked some more and made it to the shore in record time, where I nearly knocked Natalie over in my rush to get on dry land.  Natalie was bent over and clutching her knees, laughing so hard it sounded like she was having a fit.

"Good swim?" she gasped out as she started to get himself under control.

I scowled at her.  "There was a crab."

That set her off again.  I tried to keep scowling, but her laughter was contagious and soon I was laughing hard enough that tears were rolling from my eyes.

"Still think I'm a spymaster?" I asked facetiously, once we had settled down into the occasional chuckle.  Both of us were sprawled on the grass beach, and I was very much enjoying the feeling of the sun drying my wet clothes.

"I guess not," she said with a contented-sounding sigh.  She sniggered again, "Then again, you'd make a great Maxwell Smart."

I huffed in indignation and gave her a well-deserved smack.  "Bite your tongue."

"Ooo, did I hit a nerve?"

"If you must know," I said loftily.  "I would absolutely be Agent 99."

Natalie was silent for a moment and I wondered if she was thinking about how much I didn't look like the svelte Agent 99.  Then she smiled, "That does fit.  You do seem to have a knack for saving the day."

I smiled at her, but I had to admit that much of my pleasure in the banter was gone and I ended up changing the subject.  "Did you get a hold of your friend?"

A brief flash of something that might've been disappointment passed over Natalie's face, but it was gone too quickly for me to be sure.  "No," she said, with a sigh.  "The battery's dead."

I stared at her, feeling a pang of embarrassment as I realized how much time I'd wasted playing in the water.  "Why didn't you mention that before?"

"We needed a break," Natalie said, stretching languidly before sitting up.  "We've got another long hike ahead of us.  Besides, I figured it wouldn't hurt to let the police presence die down a bit; corrupt cops will be a lot harder to dodge than Bishop."  She looked at me out of the corner of her eye.  "Nice job with whatever you told the police to make them come.  From what the guard told Bishop the operator called in everything in the county that could move."

"Thanks," I said, feeling a burning in my cheeks that had nothing to do with the sun.  I sat up as well and scooted over until I was sitting in the shade.  "About your friend," I said neutrally as I tugged at the grass, ripping up a few blades to play with.  "When you do get a hold of him.  Do you think he'll be like Bishop?"

"You mean, do you think he'll try to kill us?"  I nodded.  "Probably not.  He's one of my non-criminal friends.  I met him at a Ren Faire, actually."

I mustered a smile.  "Really?  Which one?"

"Kansas City."

I laughed and shook my head.  "It really is a small world.  Blythe worked Kansas City for several years.  Actually, she's in Kansas City now, going to school."

"Wait, Blythe?  Blythe _George_ is your sister?"

I laughed again, this time self-deprecatingly.  "I know, we don't look much alike."

Natalie turned and stared at my face for several seconds until I couldn't take it anymore and ducked my head.  "I wouldn't have guessed," she said.  "She's so – "

"Outgoing?" I offered.  "Charming?" _Skinny?_

" – different," Natalie said quietly.  "I was going to say 'different'."

I lifted a shoulder.  "She is that," I acknowledged.

Natalie scooted back until she was sitting against a tree.  I debated joining her, but opted to stay where I was, lying back down so I could stare at the sky and count the clouds.  "If it makes you feel any better, Blythe knows the guy we're going to meet.  Actually, I think they might've dated."

_Of course they did_. 

There was an obvious next question to ask, but I hesitated, not sure if I wanted to know.  Unfortunately, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to let it go if I didn’t ask now.  “Did you ever want to date her?”

"She’s straight," Natalie said wryly.  "And even if she wasn’t, I don't think I had enough tattoos for her taste."

I leaned my head back a bit so I could see her.  "You have tattoos?"

"Just the one."

Interested, I shifted until I was lying on my stomach, facing her.  "Can I see?"

She smirked.  "Depends.  How are you on nudity?"

My eyebrows shot up.  "How much nudity are we talking?"

"If you have to ask, it's probably too much."

Now I was _really_ curious, but before I could follow up I was interrupted by the sound of a speedboat.  Natalie stood up quickly, carrying the gun.  "Get behind me," she said, all traces of humor gone.

I would've protested, but she was the one with the projectile weapon.  I got behind her and made sure I had a good grip on my hammer.

The two of us waited in tense anticipation until the boat came racing around the corner of the island, at which point Natalie swore.  "Police.  Hide."

Two words I never thought I'd hear in conjunction, but after the whole Bruno incident it didn't seem like a good idea to take chances.  I jumped back into the trees, Natalie close behind, and watched as the boat chugged along the shore.  The intense sunlight resulted in a striking contrast between shadow and light; hopefully it would be enough to keep us hidden from the two men peering from the boat into the trees.

"Do you think they're with Bishop?" I whispered.

"Very possible," Natalie murmured back. 

I closed my eyes and leaned back against a tree, my knees suddenly feeling a little wobbly.  This was getting serious.  "Just how small is this island?" I asked quietly. 

Natalie shrugged, her eyes still locked on the boat that was slowly making its way around the island.  "Very small," she admitted.  "But the trees and underbrush are dense and hard to search effectively."  The boat finally disappeared around the edge of the island and Natalie turned back to face me.  "As long as they don't call in search and rescue dogs, we should be fine."

"Do the Keys even _have_ search and rescue dogs?"

"Yep," she said, turning back into the woods and going to the right.  I sighed, but followed.  "At least two teams I know of, in Islamorada and Marathon."

"Oh," I said, not sure if that was good or bad.

"We're in Islamorada right now," Natalie added.

" _Oh_ ," I said.  "Crap.  Do you think they'll send the dogs after us?"

"Maybe," Natalie said.  "But keep in mind that only the dirty cops are looking for me and they don't know who you are.  Makes it harder to give the dogs a scent to trace."

I wasn't convinced.  "If I were a drug smuggler, the first people I'd pay off are the guys who control the drug-sniffing dogs."

Natalie smiled a little.  "I think the K-9 units in the Keys focus more on finding people."

That ... didn't help at all, actually, and I decided to save my breath for walking as we continued our trek through the island.  We occasionally heard people, but saw no one and apparently no one saw us because we weren't yelled at, shot at, or otherwise molested.  When we finally did stop walking, the sun was starting to get low in the sky and I had the distinct feeling that either this island was a lot larger than Natalie had made it out to be, or Natalie had walked us back and forth over the entire thing in an attempt to throw off potential bloodhounds.  Either way, I was beat and pathetically grateful for the opportunity to sit down on a damp log and rest.  "So what's next?" I asked wearily, hoping the answer would be "find dinner" or "take a nap".

"Now we wait for nightfall," Natalie said, and I took some comfort in her tired groan as she dropped down on the log next to me.

"What do we do at nightfall?" I asked, knowing in my heart of hearts that I wasn't going to like the answer, whatever it was.

"We get off the island, however we can -- boat, car, swim, whatever.  But we have to get off.  We got lucky today; we can't count on that luck lasting forever."

I was right, I didn't like that answer.  "I don't think I'll manage a swim," I said, though it very nearly killed me to admit that much weakness.  "Not without food and rest."

"Don't worry, that's the last resort," Natalie said.  She leaned against me, which might've been cute if I wasn't so tired and sore.  I shoved her off and she straightened with a slightly hangdog look on her face.  "Actually, I know where we're going and swimming isn't really a possibility," she admitted.

I slumped in relief.  "Thank goodness.  So we're stealing something?"  It said something about how tired I was that I no longer felt the slightest bit of guilt at the prospect of stealing a boat.

"I prefer to think of it as 'borrowing now and asking later'," Natalie said.  I shot her a look and she shrugged a shoulder.  "There's a rental place just a few hundred feet that way," she said, pointing in a direction that looked just as full of trees as every other direction.  "I know where he keeps his spare key."

"And how do you know that?"

"Information broker, remember?"

I narrowed my eyes at her, unconvinced.  She sighed.  "Okay, fine.  I did him a favor once."

"O-kay," I said slowly.  When she didn't provide any other information, I decided to latch on to a topic that was more immediately interesting to me: "You said you know where we're going?"

She nodded.  "There's a guy I know who uses the same model of phone as this one.  With any luck we can get a phone or a charger from him."

"A guy?"

"Named Twink.  Nickname, of course."

I had a feeling there was part of this story that I was missing, but I just didn't have the energy to push any farther.  "I'm going to take a nap," I announced, feeling like it was the best idea I'd had in days.

Fortunately Natalie seemed to agree with me as she was already nodding.  "I'll wake you up when it gets dark."

A little nervous by how readily she agreed, but too tired to care, I slid down to the damp ground, draped the upper half of my body over the log, and was instantly asleep.

~~~

I woke up the feeling of someone shaking my shoulder.  "Heather," Natalie whispered.  "Time to get up."

I muttered something filthy, but dragged myself upright.  All around me the forest was quiet and dark, full of stark shadows and dim moonlight.  It was beautiful, in an eerie sort of way.

Taking several deep breaths to wake myself up, I turned to Natalie.  "I'm up.  What now?"

"Now we borrow a jet ski," Natalie said brightly.

" _What_?" I hissed, shooting her a disbelieving look.  "What happened to stealing a boat from your friend?"

"Well, actually, he owns a jet ski rental shop," Natalie said and promptly started off through the trees, probably to avoid meeting my eyes.

Seething, mainly to cover my nervousness -- I'd never even _seen_ a jet ski in real life, much less ridden on one before -- I stomped after her.  Sure enough, within fifteen minutes we found ourselves stepping out of the trees and onto a street. 

"It's just down here," Natalie murmured in my ear, taking me by the arm and leading me down a street.  I considered throwing her hand off, but to be honest my feet felt like hamburger and I was grateful for the support.  It let me focus more attention on not limping.

The rental shop in question was just as dark and quiet as all of the houses around us had been, which wasn't very surprising as the "shop" consisted of little more than a whitewashed shed with a board-covered window.  I suspected that, like food vendors at ball games, the board would be lifted up to use as an awning over the window when the shop was open.

Natalie completely ignored the shed, instead stepping out onto the jet-ski-lined pier and stomping quietly on random boards.  On the fourth board she stomped on, she suddenly stopped.  Kneeling down, she reached under the pier; when she stood up again, she had a set of keys in her hand.  Less than a minute later we were in the shop, looking at a wall of keys on one side and snacks on the other.  I snatched a few bags of chips and glared at Natalie, daring her to protest.  She did no such thing, however, just grabbed a bag of her own and ripped it open.

For a few minutes we gorged ourselves on chips and candy, washing it all down with Coke.  I'm not usually a caffeine drinker, which meant that after drinking a single soda, I felt like I could go all night.  Natalie didn't look nearly as perky, but then again, she hadn't gotten a nap.

Once we'd satisfied our hunger, Natalie took a few bottles of water along with a key from the wall.  I grabbed another couple of bags of salty snacks and another candy bar.  Just in case.

I was nibbling away at a bag of chips when Natalie stopped in front of one of the jet skis.  "Here we are."

I froze, a lump of nacho-cheese cornmeal paste suddenly clogging my throat, and then coughed frantically.  Natalie thumped me on the back and passed over a bottle of water.  "Go down the wrong pipe?" she asked, and she sounded sympathetic rather than judgmental, but I glared reflexively at her anyway.

"No," I said, tossing the suddenly unappetizing bag of chips into a nearby trash can.  "I just forgot that we were stealing a jet ski, that's all."

Natalie looked like she didn't quite believe me, which was fair since the entire line had been a whopping lie.  Of course I hadn't forgotten we were going on jet skis.  What my sleepy brain hadn't realized, however, was that we were riding _the same_ jet ski.  Which made total sense, as it was not at all a good idea for my first attempt at driving a jet ski to be over a long distance and at night, but which was still discomfiting to me. 

The problem was that sharing a jet ski meant sharing a seat, and that was something I'd only done once before, when Paul, my best friend, offered to give me a ride on his scooter.  Even though we never left the parking lot, I'd still found the entire situation painfully uncomfortable, mainly because I'd had no idea where I should put my hands.  Around his waist made the most sense, but it felt too intimate to me.  Holding on to the seat behind me was something I'd seen Mulder do in an X-Files episode where he rode on the back of a motorcycle, but then I worried that I'd fall off.  Eventually I'd held Paul’s shoulders for support, which kept me on the scooter, but which didn't give me nearly enough balance to enjoy the ride without fear of tumbling painfully to the asphalt.

I didn't think I could get away with just holding on to Natalie's shoulders in this case.  Not unless I wanted to find out the hard way just how deep the water could get in the Keys.

In the time it had taken me to freak out over the sharing of a seat, Natalie had stowed our supplies and climbed on board the jet ski.  "Coming?" she asked.

_Do I have to?_   I sighed.  "Yes."

Moving carefully, sure that I was about to topple into the water at every moment, I slid one leg over the ski and did my best not to bump into Natalie as I settled down onto the very back of the bench seat.  The seat was short enough that Natalie's butt was brushing up against me and I had to keep my legs widespread if I didn't want them hugging Natalie's hips.  My arms hung down next to me and I swallowed hard, wondering what I should do next.

Natalie looked over her shoulder.  "You're going to have to hold on, you know," she said, sounding amused.

I scowled, but leaned forward and delicately wrapped my hands around where her love handles would be, if she had any love handles.  Under the fabric of her shirt, I could feel actual muscle definition and the inappropriate part of my brain promptly got to work picturing Natalie without a shirt.  I groaned and tried to shift further back in the seat.

Apparently Natalie was running out of patience, because she reached back with one hand and pulled me forward again, even closer than I had been before.  Then, making things even more awkward, she grabbed the hands I had at her waist and pulled them forward so that I was holding on with both arms.

"You need to hold on tight," she said firmly.  "I don't know if I'll be able to find you if you fall off."

"O-okay," I stuttered, most of my attention caught up in a new mantra: _she told me to, she told me to, she told me to_.  As wrong as it felt, if she told me to do it, holding her close had to be the right response to the current situation.

Natalie turned on the jet ski, causing a vibration to rise up through the seat, making things infinitely more uncomfortable.  I barely had time to feel awkward about it, though, before Natalie was spinning the machine away from the pier and I suddenly found all of my focus was required just to keep from falling off the back.

In the middle of a bright sunny day, riding on a jet ski is probably exhilarating.  Riding on a jet ski in the middle of a dark night, with gun-toting bad guys behind you?  Terrifying.  The jet ski itself made enough noise to make my ears rattle and it sounded even louder once we were out over open water.  I could imagine the sound waves spreading out like ripples on a lake after a stone is thrown into it; those ripples may get smaller with distance, but they never completely disappear.

Making things even worse was the fact that Natalie had the GPS sitting on the dashboard in front of her.  Intellectually I knew that she needed that GPS to find wherever we were going.  Instinctively, however, it felt incredibly stupid to be sitting on a vehicle with a light so bright it just had to be visible from shore.

Finally, a minor, but personal issue was the fact that I was getting soaked with salt spray and between that and the night air, I began to shiver with cold.  All of a sudden I found it wasn't so hard to hold on tight to Natalie: she was warm and her back was reasonably dry.  If she'd been a blanket I'd have wrapped her around me.

Though it was completely unfair: she _still_ smelled good.

Cold, uncomfortable, and perpetually skirting the edge between anxiety and fear, the ride seemed interminable to me.  It didn't help that the jet ski was going a lot slower than any I'd seen before, a fact that I attributed in large part to my own weight.  Natalie didn't say anything, for which I was grateful, but part of me worried that we might run out of gas or time, all because I was weighing us down.

As we passed under a highway bridge, Natalie leaned back and shouted something.  With my nose buried between her shoulder blades, I didn't catch the words.  " _What_?" I shouted.

" _We're almost there_ ," she yelled back.  " _Just hold on a little longer_."

My arms reflexively tightened even further around her stomach and I immediately rationalized that Natalie wouldn't have made a point to tell me to hold on if she didn't mean I should do so tightly.  When she didn't protest, I dropped my forehead down between her shoulders and nestled my nose back where it'd been before.  Hey, it was a comfortable position.  I wasn't going to think too closely about why.


	6. Chapter 6

The ride didn't last much longer; most of the remaining time was spent puttering close alongside the edge of a shoreline, using the GPS as a flashlight until Natalie found a barely visible creek-like channel and let out a tiny crow of triumph.  Personally, I couldn't see what made that channel any different than the three we'd passed before, but the caffeine had stopped working for me a couple of miles back and I found myself too tired to care about minor mysteries.

The channel was too small for the jet ski and the ski was apparently running on fumes anyway, so we abandoned it on the shore and crept up the side of the creek, Natalie with the trusty GPS held out in front of her.  I'd have to call my mom and let her know that the GPS wasn't nearly as crappy as I'd thought.  Maybe it couldn't actually get me to a given address in a given city without making me take at least one wrong turn, but I could now attest that its batteries were second to none.

"There it is," Natalie said suddenly, pointing up ahead of us.  I stayed close behind her as we skulked over to a cheap-looking metal structure that was barely visible in the moonlight.  Up close it looked even worse than it did from a distance: rust bloomed over the surface in large patches and the only visible ventilation was a crooked rectangle cut out near the top, small enough that a bird would be hard-pressed to squeeze through. 

"You have a friend here?" I asked doubtfully.

"I don't know if I'd use the word 'friend'," Natalie hedged.  When nothing else seemed forthcoming, I poked her viciously in the back.  She twisted away, and in the moonlight she looked a little angry.

Well, that was just too bad.  I was tired and thirsty again, my feet hurt, and the junk food that I'd eaten earlier was roiling in my stomach and threatening to make a second appearance.  My patience was so thin it was bordering on transparent.  "What word _would_ you use?"

"I don't know.  Is there a word for 'the guy I got arrested for running a meth lab back in Flamingo'?"

"You got a guy named _Twink_ put in jail?"

"He chose to make meth," Natalie said flatly.  "I'm not going to apologize for sending him to prison."

Which seemed harsh, but then I'd never personally known anyone who died because of illegal drugs and I was getting a sneaking suspicion that Natalie couldn't say the same.

Then the rest of her words caught up with me.  "Wait, is _this_ place a meth lab?" 

Natalie nodded.

I stared at her, horrified.  "And _this_ is the guy whose phone we want to borrow?"

"Not his phone, just his charger," Natalie said quickly.  "He keeps forgetting where they are, so he has spares everywhere."  With a hint of bitterness, she added, "Meth isn't good for your memory."

Which sounded like a story I wanted to hear at a point in time when I wasn't exhausted and worrying about being discovered by a vengeful meth maker.  "How do you know he's not in there right now?" I hissed.

"Because there's no light from inside?" she pointed out neutrally.

I glared at her, but she was right.  Also, I totally should have seen that myself.  "Any chance he'll show up while we're in there?"

"He only cooks once a week or so," Natalie said, which wasn't an answer.  "And if he was going to do it tonight, he'd already be here."

That was better.  "Okay."

"Okay?" she repeated, sounding wary.

" _Okay_ ," I repeated through gritted teeth.

We silently made our way around the side of the building to find the door.  It was both locked and had a wooden post holding the door shut, which seemed a bit like overkill.  Then again, I doubted meth was good for a person's ability to trust, either.

The post was easily removed; the lock a bit harder.  "You don't happen to know how to pick a lock, do you?" Natalie asked as she inspected the padlock.  It looked to me to be a standard key design.

"No," I said, crouching down next to her, choosing not to mention how I always wanted to learn but never did figure out how to make it work.  "What about you?"

"Only with tools," Natalie said, sounding frustrated.

I perked up.  "Does that mean you're going to have to shoot it off?" I asked hopefully.  I'd always wanted to see that in real life.

For some reason, that seemed to break the tension between us.  Natalie's lips twitched, even as she answered seriously.  "I'd rather not; sound carries a long distance over the Keys at night."

"Oh," I said, disappointed.

"And even if it didn't, meth labs tend to be explosive," Natalie added.

I stood up and took a hasty step back.  "Oh."

Natalie was grinning at me.  "Don't worry, we're safe out here.  I just don't want to risk a bullet going inside."

"Sounds perfectly reasonable to me," I said quickly.  Then a thought occurred to me and I looked more closely at the locking mechanism on the door.  Aside from the padlock, there was metal half-circle welded horizontally to the building itself.  On the door was a slotted metal plate on a hinge; to lock the door the plate was positioned so that the slot went over the metal circle and then the padlock went through the circle, locking the plate in place.  Again, very standard, but also not the most carefully thought-out design as it allowed for quite a bit of give in the door even when it was locked.

Reaching past Natalie, I gently pushed the door in and then out again.  Sure enough, I was able to go a half an inch or so each way.  By pushing the door in, it left a gap between the plate and the door.  Natalie grinned again and this time I wasn't going to complain.  "Good thinking," she murmured.  "Can I borrow your hammer?"

With space between the plate and the door, it was a simple enough matter to use the hammer to force them apart.  The hinge on the plate was attached by screws rather than welding and it gave way in just a few seconds.

Once inside, Natalie was all business.  "You take the drawers, I'll check the floor and shelves," she told me as she turned on the single light in the room: an unshaded, low-wattage light bulb that dangled from the ceiling on a cord.

I looked around the small space dubiously.  It was only about ten feet by ten feet, but in the dim light it looked like it held enough junk for a room ten times that size.  In one corner was a cot, piled high with clothes and bedding.   On the floor beside it was a crate with an electric lantern and unwashed dishes; I refused to look too closely at the shadows there, sure I'd see something crawling. 

More dishes were piled up in a crude sink that stood in the opposite corner; it was less a sink than a tub and judging from the bucket sitting next to it, Twink did his dishes in seawater.  If he did his dishes at all, that was. 

In the other two corners were heaps of chemical supplies, most of which were in high-grade packaging used by bulk chemical suppliers.  I was pretty sure that random people off the street couldn't order from those companies without raising red flags and I wondered how Twink got his supplies.

Along two walls were wire shelves, each one overflowing with chemistry glassware, more chemical supplies, and what looked like hundreds of bottles of an iodine-based water purifier used by hikers and backpackers.  I blinked and looked again, but the bottles were still there.  Natalie was shuffling through them in her search.

Which reminded me that I was falling down on the job.  I focused my attention on the folding table in the center of the room: a crude lab bench.  On the top was a motley assortment of filthy glassware, spilled chemicals, and traces of an off-white powder that I was careful not to touch.  Nothing there looked like it could possibly be used to charge a cell phone, however, so I bent down to inspect the "drawers": large plastic tubs that were stored under the table.  I was rifling through the contents of the first one -- safety gear, which surprised me -- when the shed door suddenly slammed shut.

I bolted upright and ran towards the door; Natalie beat me there by a step and shoved hard against it, but the wooden post must've already been put in place outside and the end result was Natalie rebounding off the door and into me.  The two of us tumbled to the ground.

If we were in the movies, this probably would have been a sexy moment of rising passions and romantic realizations.  In real life, however, I hit the edge of the box of safety supplies on the way down and was gritting my teeth to keep from screaming in agony. 

"Are you okay?" Natalie asked worriedly.

"Off, off, _off_ ," I choked out.  The moment she was off me, I curled up over myself, which didn't do much good since the injury was on the right side of my back.  "Ouch," I said miserably.

Natalie hovered, looking even more worried.  "Can I look?"

I wanted to say no, but that would've been stupid and potentially dangerous.  Reluctantly, I lifted up the back of my shirt, taking extra care to make sure that my stomach was still fully covered.

Natalie knelt down behind me and gently palpated the injured area, repeatedly checking in with me to make sure I wasn't feeling any shooting pains.  It didn't feel as bad as I expected; more like an early bruise than damaged organs or broken ribs.  When I didn't report any major pains from the palpations, Natalie spread her hands over my back, covering the injured area and a good bit more, and pushed in lightly.  "How does this feel?"

Rather good, actually, but I wasn't going to say that out loud.  "It's fine."

She let go of me and carefully slid the edge of my shirt back down before sitting back on her heels.  "I think you're okay."

I'd come to the same conclusion early on in the inspection, but I didn't want to admit that I'd just been letting her touch me for the sake of touching me, so I just nodded and said, "Thanks."

We stared at each other for a moment.  My breathing seemed to be coming louder with each passing second, and I could feel a drop of sweat slowly making its way down my temple, but somehow I couldn't take my eyes off Natalie's.

Unable to take it anymore, I blurted out, "Who was that?  Twink?"

Natalie jerked slightly, then blinked rapidly a couple of times and looked away.  "Probably.  Anyone else would've just killed us."  She climbed to her feet.  "Fortunately for us, Twink doesn't have the balls to kill anyone himself.  Come on, we need to keep looking for the charger."

Though she didn't say so out loud, I knew we were both thinking it: if we didn't get the phone charged soon, we were both dead.

In the end, it was Natalie who hit jackpot while I was sifting through another drawer, this one full of microfilters.  "Got it," she crowed, shoving aside bottles at the bottom of one of the shelves.  Behind it was a crude outlet, little more than a pair of plugs with visible wiring behind them.  In one of the plugs was a charger and Natalie wasted no time in attaching the phone to the charger.

The rush of relief I felt was shockingly potent and close behind it was a wave of exhaustion.  "Now what?" I asked wearily, contemplating the cot with covetous eyes even though I knew it would be suicide to take a nap in the lab.

"Now we get out of here," Natalie said; the fact that she sounded just as tired as I helped a little.  "It's a dead zone for service here; we're going to have to get closer to civilization to make a call."

I smothered a whimper.  Now that my adrenaline had run out, exhaustion was weighing down on me like a leaden blanket.  Options were lacking, however, so I dragged up every ounce of energy I had left and started inspecting the walls.  Unfortunately, as rusty as they appeared on the outside, inside they seemed sound.  Banging on the wall with my hammer produced a few dents, but nothing more.

"You said you studied chemistry, right?" Natalie called from the opposite side of the room.

"A long time ago," I said warily.  Despite what Natalie seemed to believe, I had been honest before when I said I wasn't very good at chemistry.  Theoretical work I was great at: give me a pile of numbers and an equation and I'll give you the right answer.  Lab work, on the other hand, had been a disaster.  I don't think I managed two successful experiments in all of my years at school; most of what I got out of the labs had been how to write convincing error reports.  Thankfully most of the labs had been bundled up into my classroom grade; the one exception had resulted in my first and only D -- to this day I'm convinced the teacher had only passed me because he'd dreaded the thought of having me in his lab again.

Thus it was with great trepidation that I moved over to join Natalie at one of the chemical stashes.  She helpfully hauled each barrel and jug out from the pile, one at a time, and showed me the labels.  Most of them were highly toxic and more suited for cars or sinks than humans -- what did they use the car batteries for, anyway? -- and the remaining ingredients, like lye, weren't useful. 

We were nearing the bottom of the stash when she dragged forward a ten-gallon, dark blue plastic drum.  It made a sloshing sound as she twisted it around to bring the label to the front, and my eyes widened as I saw what liquid it contained.  "Holy shit."

Natalie blinked away some sweat and bent over to read the label: HYDROCHLORIC ACID 34.  "Huh," she said.  "What's the thirty-four mean?"

"That's how concentrated it is," I said, a little numbly as I looked again at the size of the room and the poor ventilation.  Considering how hot this place had to get in the summer, Twink had either been suicidal or completely insane.

Natalie looked intrigued by my answer.  "Is thirty-four a good concentration?"

I laughed, a little hysterically.  "That means it's 34 percent hydrochloric acid to 76 percent water," I told her.  "It's the most concentrated HCl you can buy."

Natalie shook her head at me, looking a little impressed.  "And you said you weren't good at chemistry."

I flushed.  "Actually, dissolving metal in hydrochloric acid was my physical chemistry teacher's gimmick, to get the students interested in science."  Every science teacher had one on the first day of classes; my inorganic chemistry teacher had gone with liquid nitrogen, using it to freeze tennis balls before throwing them at the wall and causing them to shatter.  My organic chemistry teacher had used wordplay, telling us all about dihydrous monoxide, the most lethal substance on earth that had killed more people than every other chemical combined.  He let us mull over that for a few minutes before explaining that dihydrous monoxide was another way of saying H2O, the chemical formula for plain old water.

"Great, then you know all about it," Natalie said enthusiastically, turning back to open the barrel.

"Wait!" I shouted.  She froze.  "God," I said feeling a little shaky.  "You have to be careful with hydrochloric acid when it's that concentrated.  It fumes, especially at higher temperatures, and can corrode your lungs.  We need face masks and gloves, at the very least, and we need to make sure we expose as little of the acid to air as possible."

Natalie held up her hands and stepped back warily.  "Corrode your lungs?"

"Very slowly, but yeah.  And if you add bleach to it, you make chlorine gas, which will _liquefy_ your lungs.  So be careful."

"Absolutely," Natalie said, sounding sincere.  "Except that guys with guns are probably going to be a lot more lethal than acid fumes, so we need to figure out how to make this acid useful."

"Masks and gloves are in the bin below the table," I said, pointing in the general direction, as my eyes were already scanning the shelves.  "I'll just see if I can find ... yes!"  There on the top shelf were a bunch of plastic squirt bottles.  Usually they were used to rinse out tiny flasks and vials with distilled water before experiments or synthesizing new compounds, but the plastic was non-corrosive to hydrochloric acid and the tiny nozzle would ensure a very narrow stream of fluid.  Under the circumstances, we weren't going to do any better.

Once Natalie and I had both donned masks and gloves, we set about filling up the bottles.  It was a tricky process, and as I was the one holding the bottles while Natalie poured -- she had more upper body strength -- I ended up with quite a few splashes of acid on my gloves.  The moment the last bottle was filled, I held out my hands.  "Get them off me.  Now."

Natalie hastened to comply.  "Is it burning?"

"Not yet," I said tightly.  "But I don't want to take any chances.  At this concentration hydrochloric acid can eat through skin.  It'd be slow, but without water to rinse it off, I wouldn't be able to stop it."

Judging by how white Natalie's face was as she stripped off my gloves, I wasn't going to have to warn her again about being careful.  Sure enough, when I handed her one of the acid-filled bottles, she handled it with great respect.  Though I might've overdone it a little; when it came time to put acid on the metal walls of the shed, I was the one who squirted first and Natalie's initial attempt barely produced any liquid at all.  The fact that said acid didn't have enough force to land on the wall and thus almost fell on her boots was probably the reason why she used more force on her second try.

The corrosiveness of acid on metal is measured in millimeters per year.  This meant that fairly thick metal, like nails, could take weeks or even months to dissolve in acid.  Sheet metal, on the other hand, is usually less than a millimeter thick and it didn't take long before we managed to cut a line through the wall from the height of our heads all the way down to the floor.  For a moment we just stared at that line, watching as the remaining acid continued to eat away at the edges.  "Maybe we should cut out a square," I suggested tentatively.

"We shouldn't risk it," Natalie said, though she didn't look any more excited than I about potentially brushing up against acid-lined metal.  "Guys with guns could be showing up any second now."

Unfortunately, that was a compelling argument and Natalie and I started kicking back the sheet metal around the cut.  We managed to open it up enough to get through without touching the edges, but only if we were careful, and I wasn't thrilled about trying to carry the machine gun through at the same time.  My hammer would be easier.

In fact, it proved to be a piece of cake to get myself and my gear through and I was smiling happily when I looked back through the hole at Natalie.  She was standing with her back to me, the machine gun draped over one arm and the cell phone peeking out of one of her pockets.  "Come on," I called out quietly.

Natalie turned around, revealing a bottle in her hands.  A bottle of bleach.

"No," I said, feeling my throat close up in panic.  "No."

"It'll slow them down," Natalie said.  Her voice was gentle, but her words were anything but as she added, "They're trying to kill us.  If we can kill a few of them first, that's just self-defense."

I shook my head with enough force to make my hair slap against my face.  "No."  I couldn't think of anything else to say; the idea was just so wrong that my only possible response to it was a profound NO.

She stared at me for a moment, then shook her head.  "I'm sorry, but we're out of options.  I have to do this."

"It's a _chemical weapon_ ," I said desperately.  "You can't – "

"I can," Natalie said firmly.  "If it's us or them, I can."

I swallowed hard.  "I won't help," I said, tightly. "I can't."

"It's okay," she said quietly.  "I'm not asking you to.  All I need is your hammer to knock the wall back in place."

I stared down at my hammer, currently sitting innocuously in my hand.  My fingers, the ones curled around the handle, suddenly felt like they belonged to some other person, and when Natalie stepped forward and slowly pulled the hammer from my grasp, those fingers did nothing to stop her.

"It'll be okay," she told me.

I shook my head and walked away.

Of course, I couldn't go very far; even with the moonlight I could barely see the ground and I was so turned around that I had no idea where to find the ocean, much less the jet ski.  If the jet ski was even there; it might've been stolen or scuttled by Twink.

Thus it was from the shadow of the trees that I saw Natalie carefully arrange the bottle of bleach on top of the folding table before lifting the barrel of acid with enviable ease and positioning it on the table as well.  From the angle of the hole we'd made in the wall, the bleach was directly in front of the barrel, which I took to be an ominous sign, especially when Natalie stepped out of the wall and began to hammer the metal sheeting back in place, carefully leaving a small hole in the middle that looked distinctly like a gun port.

In the quiet darkness of the night, that banging rang out louder than gunshots.  If there were any bad guys around, they had to know that we -- that _Natalie_ \-- was up to something.  She finished the job without anyone coming, however, leaving a wall with a thin, open vertical line and a hole at chest level.  As I watched, Natalie lined up her gun with the hole and aimed carefully before firing twice.  Then she sprinted in my direction.

As I watched, greenish-yellow gas began to seep out of the crack in the metal.  I pictured that gas billowing up inside the building, just waiting for someone to open the door and step inside.  I pictured that unknowing person taking a breath, sucking the corrosive gas into their lungs.  I pictured that person gasping for breath, choking on his own blood as his lungs began to melt in his chest.

My stomach suddenly rebelled and I barely had time to lean away from my shoes before throwing up violently.  I felt my hair being scraped away from my face, but ignored it in favor of continuing to heave.

When I finally ran out of food and bile I stood up shakily, wrapping my arms around my aching stomach.  "Are you okay?" Natalie asked, carefully lifting my head with a hand under my chin.  With her other hand, she brushed tendrils of hair off my face.

"Give me the gun," I told her.

Her hand stopped, just over the edge of my cheekbone.  "What?"

"The gun.  Give it to me."

Natalie stepped back, dropping her arms.  "Why?"

"Natalie, _give me the goddamn gun._ "

She stared at me, but after a moment she slipped the gun off her shoulder and passed it to me.

I took the machine gun and lifted it up to my shoulder, pointing it at the shed.  Not much aim was required, so I just pulled the trigger.  The gun punched back into my still-sore shoulder, but I was too angry to care as I pulled the trigger again.  And again.

It took two more bullets before I finally heard a _fwoomph_ and the sides of the shed suddenly bulged out.  Inside Natalie's homemade gun port I could see the flickering red and orange of flame, and in the light chill of the night I could feel heat pouring from the building.

Still furious, I flipped up the gun and turned around to see Natalie staring at the shed, looking bemused.  Slapping the gun into Natalie's chest, I strode past her into the woods --

– only to trip over a root and face-plant into a mud puddle. 

Heather George, Smooth Operator.  That's me.

I turned over to find Natalie already leaning over me with a hand out to help me up.  I stared at that hand, wondering just how stupid and spiteful it'd be of me to slap it away, then reached up to take it.  Natalie's fingers closed around mine and she began to tug.

Then the shed exploded.


	7. Chapter 7

I was shielded from the blast by Natalie's body and by dint of the fact that I was already on the ground.  Natalie wasn't so lucky: the shockwave threw her forward in the direction she'd been leaning and she crashed nose first into the nearest stationary object.  Unfortunately that object happened to be my sternum.

For a moment I just stayed there on the ground, doing my best to ignore the shooting pain in my chest and the way Natalie's face was nestled between my breasts by trying to figure out exactly why the shed had exploded.  The hydrogen gas that was the second byproduct of hydrochloric acid and bleach was highly flammable, but it didn't explode, so that couldn't be the culprit.  Which just left the chlorine gas, which was highly corrosive but not at all flammable or explosive unless combined with ...

_Shit._   I distinctly remembered a giant bottle of blue glass cleaner, the kind that consisted mostly of ammonia.  I'd forgotten about that in my righteous rush to set the shed on fire. 

Feeling stupid and a little ashamed, I sighed and shook Natalie's shoulder.  It took a couple of tries before she lifted her head, revealing a bloody nose.  Of course, that just made me feel worse.  "You okay?" I asked, even though it was patently obvious that she wasn't.

Natalie frowned a bit, looking bewildered as she glanced around.  I could tell the moment she realized exactly where she was, because she tensed and abruptly rolled off me.  "Sorry," she muttered, wiping at her upper lip.  When her hand came back bloody, she looked surprised and promptly started running her fingers up and down the bridge of her nose.

"Is it broken?" I asked tentatively, not at all sure I wanted to hear the answer.

"I don't think so," Natalie said, her voice sounding nasal as she squeezed her nose lightly a couple of times.  "Just sore."

I winced.  "I'm sorry."

"Not your fault," Natalie said, which meant she was not fully aware of the facts of the situation.  Before I could explain what I'd done, however, she was already rising to her feet.  "Come on," she said, bending down to take my hand and unceremoniously hauling me upright.  "There's no way the bad guys missed all of that; we have to get out of here."

Feeling like eight kinds of a heel, I picked my hammer and the GPS off the ground and hurried after Natalie, who was making exceptionally good time through the woods.

We didn't talk much as we walked, me because I was too busy castigating myself for being so careless and Natalie ... I figured Natalie was probably blaming me as well, because she didn't say anything to me and, when I stumbled over the odd root, she didn't turn back to help.

We'd been walking for nearly an hour when she finally spoke for the first time.  "Nice job with the explosion."

I blinked at her in surprise.  "What?"

Natalie shifted; in the moonlight I couldn't really make out the gesture, but it looked like a stiff sort of shrug.  "The explosion.  That was good work.  Probably it'll slow them down more than the gas would have, and it won't piss them off nearly as much."

"Oh," I said. 

"Though next time you might want to get us clear of the blast radius first."

I swallowed hard, feeling another wave of guilt.  Honesty compelled me to admit, "I didn't actually plan the explosion.  Hydrogen gas is one of the products of the acid and bleach reaction and I'd just planned on setting that on fire.  I'd forgotten there was ammonia in the room as well."  Which meant the blast was well and truly my fault, because the ammonia would undoubtedly have remained safely packaged in plastic if someone, namely me, hadn't started a fire in the room to melt that plastic.

Natalie was silent for a few more steps before she made another awkward-looking shrug.  "Intentional or not, it worked.  Thank you."

"You're welcome."  I desperately wanted to stop there, but between her comments on Twink and the insanity with the chlorine gas, there were a few things about Natalie that I had to know so, in a small voice, I added, "Um.  About the gas.  Didn't you think that was a little overkill?"

Natalie paused for a moment before she continued walking.  "Maybe," she said, sounding grudging.  "But anyone going into a meth lab has to know that it's dangerous.  Those men knew the risks they were taking."

" _I_ went into that meth lab."

"Because I took you there.  People don't just stumble across that building; the whole point of putting it out here is for it to be hidden."

I mulled that over for a few minutes.  I hadn't quite formulated a response when Natalie added, with a hint of desperation, "They're coming to kill us, Heather.  Doesn't that matter to you?"

Suddenly I realized where the disconnect between us lay, because while it did matter to me that people were coming to kill me, I was mostly bothered by the idea that _someone else_ was deliberately trying to end my life.  That was _my_ prerogative.  I may not have been actively suicidal like I was as a teenager, but the very idea that someone other than myself or Mother Nature was going to end my life was offensive.

Natalie, on the other hand, cared about the fact that people were trying to kill her because she _didn't want to die_.  Unlike myself, she had a strong survival instinct, and that instinct made her ruthless when it came to a choice between her life or her killer's.  It wasn't a feeling that I shared, but it was one that I could understand in the abstract.

That said, she hadn't been ruthless with me.  Carjacking me may not have been the nicest thing she could have done, but I was confident now that she'd intended to let me go, probably at that tennis club near the place where we'd first met Bishop.  If I'd just stayed in the trunk, if I hadn't been seen with Natalie and thus connected to her, I'd be back at home at this very moment, probably fast asleep in preparation for work tomorrow.

All of which left me unsure of what to do next.  On the one hand, Natalie was ruthless towards her enemies and she might also be nursing some sort of issue about meth that made her a little crazy.  On the other hand, she was highly protective of me and, judging by the way she kept managing to take us to the middle of nowhere in relatively well-populated islands, she was making a special effort to prevent any other innocents from getting involved in this whole fiasco.

So was she a good person or a bad person?  At that point, I couldn't decide either way.  What I did know was that I was stuck with her and, if I was honest with myself, that wasn't a situation about which I wanted to complain.

Eventually Natalie called it a night.  Since there didn't seem to be any reason why the dead tree we stopped at was any different from any other dead tree, I decided she'd probably stopped because she was exhausted, which helped soothe my wounded pride as I collapsed to the ground, stared up at the tree canopy, and contemplated expiring.

"Heather?"

Natalie's voice sounded uncertain, so I wasn't sure what to expect when I flopped my head over to see what she wanted.  I certainly didn't expect to see her holding her arm out invitingly.  "Now that we're not moving, it's going to get cold," she added.

The remnants of my unease warred with the fact that I was already starting to shiver.  With a sigh, I scooted over.  Natalie's arm immediately wrapped around me and I have to admit that the gesture warmed me even more than the heat of her body.

~~~

The next morning I woke up first and, just like the last time I'd woken up in Natalie's arms, I felt amazingly safe.  Part of me wanted to rebel at what was clearly some sort of evolutionary remnant designed to make people crave human contact.  The rest of me reveled in a feeling that I'd only ever experienced once in my life before I met Natalie.

I have had four major friends in my life.  Paul, my best friend, is the only one I'm still in contact with; he and I met all the way back in middle school.  Linda, who was one of my old college professors, took nearly eight years to develop a friendship with; that same friendship only took one phone call and one e-mail to end.  Stacy was a fellow member of MENSA and she'd been pretty open with her interest in me; unfortunately, by the time I got around to returning that interest a year later, she'd already moved on. 

Then there was Alec, a fellow college student, though he was ten years older than me.  Rather than go to college right out of high school, he'd joined a band and toured the country, which meant he had vastly more worldly experience than I did, not to mention a good decade of extra maturity.  Alec was the first, and to date only, person who ever treated me with old-fashioned chivalry: he opened doors for me, he noticed when I cut my hair, he paid for any food or drink I consumed while we were together.  Yet, we weren't dating and it wasn’t only because I was gay; at that point in my life I still thought I might have been bisexual.  My personal suspicion was that I was the backup in case his girlfriend at the time ever fell through.  It sounds harsh, but in reality it was an ideal situation for me: it gave me the opportunity to learn how to respond to dating behavior without the added pressure of actually dating.  Not to mention the fact that, as much as the feminist in me was annoyed by the opening of doors (I usually tried to get to them before he could), being treated as if I was someone special was a rare experience for me, and I soaked it up like a sponge.

One day, in my second or third year of college, I had a dream.  In it, Alec and I were sitting halfway up a hill covered in the fallen leaves of autumn.  Alec was sitting behind me, and I was between his legs, leaning back against him, with his arms wrapped around my chest. 

That was it, the whole dream.  When I woke up, however, I felt a pervading sensation of safety that rocked my world. 

I never did tell Alec about the dream, but that doesn't change the fact that I carried that friendship for another five years after we finally graduated and moved on into the real world, all in the hopes that one day I'd have that dream again.  I never did, and Alec never held me that way, and I'm pretty sure he's now married to the woman he was dating in college.  I never did forget the feeling though, and it was becoming rapidly obvious to me that I never lost that craving for it, either.  If it was possible, I think I could have stayed there in Natalie's arms forever.

Natalie shifted in her sleep and my spine locked up, eliminating any positive feelings as I tried to figure out what I was supposed to do in this situation.  It was easier before: I was too terrified of the roach to care how I behaved.  Now, however, I was anxious about making the wrong move and looking like a fool.

I was still trying to figure out the best move to make when Natalie lifted her arm up from behind my back and stretched backwards over the log, exposing a strip of skin between her shirt and the waistband of her pants.  I caught myself staring and looked away quickly, hoping that Natalie hadn't noticed.

After a few more stretches that seemed designed to show off her body to its best advantage, Natalie bounded to her feet.  I looked down at my bruised and blistered toes, clearly visible through my miserable sandals, and decided that I hated her, just a little.

Natalie pulled out the cell phone while I dragged myself upright and for once everything seemed to go right.  She connected with her friend, the friend was willing to help us, and all we had to do was trek another couple hundred feet to reach the ocean, because apparently the spot we stopped at during the night wasn't so random after all.

Those hundred yards or so felt like a mile to my battered feet.

I perked up a bit, however, when we stepped out of the trees and into the sunshine and for a few moments I just turned my face up to the sun and soaked in the heat and light.

"There's time, if you want to try another swim," Natalie offered.

I harrumphed.  "I don't know if I should after last time."

"I'm sure you'll be safe.  It isn't all that common for people to be attacked by crustaceans."

I turned to glare at her, but my heart wasn't in it, and in the end I took a successful dip in the lukewarm water.  I felt a hundred times better with all of that mud and gunk off my skin and out of my hair and while my clothes were permanently stained, at least they reeked just a tiny bit less.

Like the day before, I stretched out on the beach to dry, Natalie at my side.  There wasn't any banter this time, however, and I felt the loss keenly. 

Natalie abruptly sat up and, a little confused, I did the same.  "Are we okay?" she asked.

I blinked at her.  "Um.  Sure?"

She glared at me for some reason.  "I'm serious, Heather."

"And I'm serious that I have no idea what you're talking about."

"I'm talking about last night," she growled.  "About the way you were giving me the silent treatment."

I gaped at her.  " _Me_?  What about _you_?  You barely said a word to me all night."

Natalie looked away.  "I thought you were still angry with me, about the gas."

I considered her words and realized that, after all of that inner debate, I'd never told her my conclusions.  "I really don't agree with what you were planning to do with the gas," I admitted.  "And if you do something like that again, I'm going to do everything I can to stop you.  But I do understand why you did it.  I don't agree, but I understand."

"Just like that," Natalie said doubtfully.

I shrugged.  "I have a lot of family in Utah who are Mormons; I strongly disagree with nearly all of their core beliefs, but I still love them and still spend time with them.  My best friend is a pacifist, which I can't agree with, but he's still my best friend.  My mom and stepfather smoke heavily and the smell makes me feel queasy every moment I spend with them, but that doesn't stop me from visiting any chance I get."

"That's not the same … " Natalie started.

"It _is_ ," I interrupted.  "People are who they are; if you care about someone you accept her or him, warts and all."

"I've heard people say that before," Natalie said, still sounding like she didn't quite believe me.  "I've never met anyone who actually practices it, though."

"Yeah, well," I muttered.  "My mom always told me I was judgmental.  Me being me, that meant I had to turn myself into the least judgmental person on Earth."

"I guess I owe your mom some flowers, then."

I scoffed at her, but wasn't quite able to cover up a smile.  "When's your friend getting here, anyway?  Wait -- this one _is_ a friend, isn't he?  Not someone you sent to jail?"

Natalie rolled her eyes.  "Yes, this guy is a friend.  He dated your sister, remember?  And he should be here soon; all he had to do before coming was to fuel up his boat."

I nodded and then, since Natalie seemed to be in an expansive mood at the moment, went on to ask a question that was really starting to bug me.  "You said before that you did business with drug smugglers.  Is that true?"

She looked at me askance.  "Where did that come from?"

"I'm curious," I said defensively, not quite ready to mention my suspicions about her possible tragic past with meth.

Natalie frowned suspiciously, but answered, "Technically Cuban cigars are drugs.  As is pot."

I felt a wave of relief, but before I relaxed completely, I asked, "What about heroin and cocaine and meth?"

Natalie was shaking her head before I finished speaking.  "I don't deal in that shit.  Actually, some of the information I sell is to the government; there's a lot of reward money available for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of drug smugglers."

I flopped back onto the ground, feeling like an enormous weight had been lifted off my shoulders.  I meant what I'd said to Natalie about being non-judgmental, but some things were a lot harder to accept than others. 

Natalie leaned over me.  "Okay?"

"I'm great," I told her honestly.  Pushing myself back upright, I asked, "What do you sell to drug dealers, anyway?"

Natalie's face instantly closed.  "I can't talk about that."

I lost some of my ease.  "Why not?"

"Because my sources are secret," she said firmly.  "I promise them anonymity in exchange for their information."

I frowned, but couldn't really argue the point.  Still: "I'm not asking for names, just some examples.  Like Bishop.  What did you sell him?"

Natalie sighed and stared up at the sky for a few moments.  I was about to give up on that question and press her with another when she looked back down at me.  "Bishop wanted coast guard patrol schedules."

"And you just gave them to him?"

"I _sold_ them to him, yes."  Off my look, she added defensively, "They're cigars!  What does it matter where they come from?"

I'm sure Paul, who was very political, or my dad, who'd been very conservative, would have had a response to that question.  I just conceded her point, and stated, "So you have someone in the coast guard who feeds you information."

"I'm not answering that," Natalie said immediately.  I sulked.  She rolled her eyes.  "What I can tell you, though, is that I got that information in exchange for giving up five locations where cocaine and heroin were being smuggled into the country."

Oh.  That didn't sound so bad.  Still, there was a lot of information out there.  "What about assassination?  Would you give information to a murderer?"

"Shockingly, that doesn't come up often," Natalie said dryly.  "But no, I do not feed information to known assassins."

I sighed in relief.  "Human traffickers?"

"What possible information could I sell to human traffickers?"

I thought about it.  "Customs patrol schedules?"

Natalie smiled.  "Not terribly useful, trust me.  If you're trying to smuggle in humans, it makes much more sense to bribe a customs official."  I opened my mouth to ask another question and she quickly added, "Really, most of my sales are completely legal and aboveboard."

"Examples?" I pushed.  I couldn't help it; I hated getting only partial information.

Natalie shook her head and dropped down to lie on the grass next to me.  "For example, I have friends in Hollywood.  Not big-name actors, or anything, but light technicians, audio engineers, gaffers, folks like that.  Sometimes one of my Hollywood friends will tell me about some jackhole actor who can't keep his hands to himself and who has groped said friend.  Sometimes several friends will tell me the same news about the same actor.  And occasionally I'll take that information to the tabloids."

I twisted my head around to stare at her.  "The Duane Bristow thing?  That was you?"

"Trust me, he deserved it."

"Wow," I said, feeling a little stunned.  The Duane Bristow affair had been huge; before the articles he'd been poised to be the Next Big Thing.  These days he mostly showed up in bit parts on failing TV shows and the occasional commercial.  Curiously, I asked, "Does a story like that pay well?"

"Oh, yes," Natalie said, positively dripping satisfaction.

I was about to ask a no-doubt impertinent and socially inexcusable question about just how much qualified as "well", when the sound of a boat engine filled the air.  Natalie and I exchanged a glance and scrambled to our feet, grabbing our gear and heading straight for the woods.

As soon as the boat came into view, however, Natalie relaxed.  "It's okay.  It's Blade."

"Blade?" I repeated incredulously.  "The guy Blythe dated in Kansas City is named _Blade_?"

"It's a nickname," she said as she stepped out onto the grass.  "I think."

"That's comforting," I muttered, but loosened my grip on my hammer and moved up to stand next to Natalie as the boat pulled up to the shore.  The man on board was tall and dark-skinned, with a broad chest and curly shoulder-length hair.  All in all he was remarkably attractive for a guy and I recognized him immediately.  "You're the guy who offered me pot in Georgia!"

He looked me over dubiously.  "Huh.  Maybe?"

Natalie leaned up to clasp forearms with the guy.  "Hey, Blade.  This is Heather, Blythe George's sister."

"Right.  I remember.  The prude with common sense."

My lips twisted ruefully.  "Yep.  That would be me."

Natalie looked at me askance, but turned back to Blade without comment. "Thanks for picking us up, man."

"Not a problem," Blade said, pulling Natalie aboard.  I declined any help and hauled myself on board under my own power.  Natalie was still looking at me oddly when I sat down next to her, but when she spoke it was just to ask, "Was he the first?"

"First?"

"Person to offer you pot."

I laughed a little.  "Uh, no.  That would be my mom."

"Your mom?"

"Yeah."  I glanced over to see that Blade was driving the boat and paying no attention to us before telling the story.  "I don't remember how old I was, but it was sometime when I was in college.  I knew Mom and Joe smoked pot already because Blythe had found their bong years ago, but they'd never done it in front of me.  Then one night on my mom's birthday -- it must've been a big one, because a whole bunch of us went out to dinner at this great German restaurant -- everyone but me got smashingly drunk.  After dinner everyone came back to my folks' place and my mom pulled me aside and whispered that they were going to do something I might not approve of."

Natalie guffawed.  "Something you might not approve of?  Really?"

I grinned back.  "I know, it was embarrassing.  Anyway, I let her know that I knew what she was talking about and she asked if I wanted to join them."

"And you said no," Natalie guessed.

"I did," I acknowledged.  "I was in my rebellious phase at the time.  Of course, considering my parents, I rebelled by not drinking or doing drugs or smoking.  It made me very boring."

Natalie frowned a little at that, then surprised me by wrapping an arm around my shoulders.  I held myself stiff for a second, not quite sure what to do, before leaning in slightly.  She was very warm, and it felt good through my wind-chilled wet clothes.  Leaning over so that her mouth was right next to my ear, she murmured, "I don't think you're boring."

A thrill ran through my body and I swallowed hard.  "Thanks," I whispered, so softly that she might not have even heard me.

Then again, maybe she did, because she held me close for the entire ride.


	8. Chapter 8

Maybe a native Floridian would be able to identify the various Keys from the sea, but it's not a skill I possess.  As we approached our destination all I could tell from the boat was that the shore was lined with tall stately mangroves, interspersed with bushes full of bright reddish-orange flowers.  We were far enough from the highway that I couldn't hear any cars, much less see them, and the water was crystal clear and mercifully free of the normally ubiquitous sea grass.

All in all, it was quite pretty, but what I was most thrilled with was the dock I saw jutting out into the water, with a ramshackle, yet kitschy building at the end. There was a giant flamingo cutout on the corner of the building, which had probably been pink before the paint started peeling.  Thanks to the large patches of weathered wood peeking through it looked a little leprous, but the flamingo's wide grin was still visible.  "I'm guessing that's where we're headed," I called to Natalie over the sound of the boat.  She just nodded and squeezed me tight for a second before getting up to help Blade tie the boat up to the dock.

Since I didn't know a thing about seaman's knots, I stayed on my seat and watched them, trying to make some sort of sense out of my feelings.  It wasn't easy, as I'd never felt anything like this before, not even during that ridiculous crush I'd had on Paul, back when we were still in high school and before I realized that I found breasts far more attractive than penises.

What I was feeling for Natalie was nothing like the easy affection I now felt for Paul.  It was a wild, chaotic emotion that shot through my system like an out-of-control pinball, exhilarating and terrifying all at once.  The closest thing I could compare it to was a manic episode, except warmer and with slightly less potential to go completely off the rails.

All of which would be wonderful, if it weren't for the fact that Natalie was so far out of my league I might as well be playing a different sport.  I could just imagine the Jocelyn woman that Bishop had mentioned.  Undoubtedly she'd be tall and thin and beautiful, the type of woman who walked in to a room and made it a lovelier place just for being present.  I, on the other hand --

"Hanging in there?"

My head snapped up to see Natalie looking down at me with concern.  I glanced over to see that the boat was firmly tied up and Blade was nowhere in sight. 

"Sorry," I said.  Natalie’s clear concern lightened my mood enough for me to offer up a small, but real, smile.  "Wool-gathering.  So, what's next?"

"I was thinking food, if you're up for it."

" _Yes_ ," I said with feeling.

"Good," she said with a smile.  "Because Blade is fixing up some of his famous half-pound Key burgers with all the trimmings.  If we hurry, we might get to see his secret ingredient."

"Try to hold me back," I said, feeling lighter than I had in a while. 

An hour or so later, satiated and a little drowsy, Natalie and I swung on hammocks in Blade's tiny, but fully-fenced backyard.  "So what now?" I asked, feeling lazy but also like I was forgetting something important.  "Shouldn't we be running away again?"

"Soon," Natalie said.  "I made some calls while you and Blade were making lunch.  Once I hear back from a few people, I'll know what our options are."

I considered the fact that I probably should be calling people but, as I had a couple of times before, I pushed the thought away.  While I knew my mother and sister were probably frantic with worry, I was a little afraid of what might happen if I called to let them know I was okay.  If there really were federal agents after Natalie, they had to know I was with her by now.  It wasn't completely paranoid to wonder if my family's phones were bugged.

That didn't stop me from feeling guilty about not calling.

To distract myself, and because I thought I had the right to know, I asked what I'd been wondering almost from the moment I'd first met Natalie:  "Okay, I've been patient long enough.  Seriously, why are these guys after you?"

 Natalie stared up into the sky for a few beats before sighing and sliding out of her hammock.  I watched in confusion as she bent down and quickly unlaced one of her boots before spending a good thirty seconds wrestling it off her foot.  Turning it upside down, she shook it for a second until something dropped out of it.  Something that looked very much like a flash drive. 

Natalie plucked the object off the ground and handed it to me and, yep, it was exactly what it looked like.  "Have you ever heard of a dead box?" she asked me.

I frowned.  "Is that like in movies, when a guy has a bunch of people trying to kill him, he puts incriminating papers in a box and gives them to a friend to release in the event of his death?"

Natalie looked surprised.  "Yes, in fact, it's exactly like that.  Only it's not usually a good idea to give a dead box to a friend, because even if that friend doesn't get killed as well, he or she rarely knows what to do with the information if it ever does need to be passed on."

"Ah," I said, a light dawning in my brain.  "But you, as an information broker, know plenty of people to pass that information on to."

"Exactly.  Dead box holding is one of the services I provide.  Not one in high demand, but it pays well and it doesn't involve much work on my part."

"But apparently it can be dangerous," I guessed dryly.

"The downside of brokering information for everyone is that everyone knows who I am," Natalie said, sliding back onto the hammock.  "In this instance, someone figured out that I was the dead box holder for a man named David Gilbert, who just happened to die two nights ago in a car accident."

"A car accident, or a 'car accident'?" I asked, using air quotes.

"No idea," Natalie said.  "And it doesn't matter.  He's dead, his package needs to be delivered.  That's my job."

"Okay, then, who do you need to deliver it to?"

"That's where it gets tricky," Natalie admitted.  "David was an undercover DEA agent who was afraid there was a mole in his department.  Since he didn't know who the mole was, I'm supposed to deliver it to the head of the DEA or, if that's not possible, to someone very high up in the FBI."

"How high up?"

"Higher than anyone I actually know at the FBI," Natalie said, sounding frustrated.  "Which wouldn't have been a big deal if there weren't people trying to kill me before I can get to Washington."

I thought about that for a few minutes while staring up into the perfectly clear blue sky.  "They're going to have people watching all flights to Washington," I said slowly, testing the words in my mind as I said them.  They sounded plausible.

"Right," Natalie confirmed.

"What if you just don't go to Washington?  I researched the FBI once for a story I was writing – " - no reason why she had to know the story featured Agents Mulder and Scully - " – and found out that the really big city offices are headed up by important people in the FBI.  Assistant directors, I think, or section chiefs."

Natalie looked thoughtful.  "That's actually a really good idea.  If nothing else, I can avoid anyone watching the airports in Washington itself.  Unfortunately, that doesn't help with the fact that there are exactly two airports in the Keys.  I guarantee there are men watching both of them."

I had to admit that I had nothing to offer there, so I turned back to stare at the sky.  "What kind of story was it, anyway?" Natalie asked out of nowhere.

I winced.  "Just a story I wrote.  For fun."  I cleared my throat and went on the offensive before she could ask another question.  "It's not fair, though, you know all about me and all I know about you is that you're an information broker and that you once dated a woman named Jocelyn.  And I had to hear that last fact from _Bishop_."

"I'm not very good at talking about myself," Natalie said reluctantly.

"Try," I said flatly, feeling a bit testy about the whole situation now that I'd spelled it out in words.  The things I'd told her had been deeply personal for me.  I deserved to get something back.  "For example, why didn't you have a bun with your burger?  I thought you might be on the Atkins Diet – " - as if she needed to be on any diet at all - " – but you ate plenty of fries."

Natalie rubbed her face.  "Wow, you don't pull any punches."  Which was odd, as I'd picked that question precisely because it seemed like it would be a good one to ease into the more difficult questions.

"I could ask something else," I offered tentatively.

"No, that's okay.  Short answer is: I hate bread.  Even the smell of it makes my stomach turn."

"Ah," I said, sincerely hoping there would be a long answer to follow as a dislike of bread, while odd, wasn't all that dramatic.

"The long answer" - _yes!_ \- "goes back to my dad, who was in the country illegally."

I blinked and stared at Natalie: blonde-haired, green-eyed Natalie.  "From Mexico?"

Natalie managed a half-smile, but didn't look at me.  "Yeah.  He was looking for _his_ father, who was an American soldier, but that's a whole other story.  For this story all that matters is that Dad was in the US illegally when he fell in love with my mom.  And while they did get married, the truth of the matter is that marrying a US citizen is not enough to automatically get a green card, no matter what the movies tell you. 

"For a long time, his status didn't matter -- he got a job in construction and got paid good money, even if it was under the table.  Mom got pregnant with Adam, my oldest brother, then with Danny, and then me, and then Luke."  She smiled a little.  "I think Mom was ready to stop with me, because she’d really wanted a girl.  Luke was a surprise, but Mom loved him anyway.  And Dad loved us kids; I think he would have been happy with ten.  Anyway, back then it didn't even matter all that much that they didn't have insurance; there was a local midwife who handled all of the births and my brothers and I were almost never sick.

"Then Dad got hurt."  Natalie's voice, which had been casual and even light at times up to this point, suddenly deepened and grew husky.  "We never did find out what happened; something about a safety line that wasn’t tied properly.  What I do know is that he fell, several stories, and shattered his legs and pelvis.  They immediately rushed him to the emergency room, but there wasn't much that could be done; both of his legs had to be amputated."

"Oh," I said, feeling a little ill.  "But he didn't have any insurance."

"Exactly," Natalie said with a bitter smile.  "No insurance and, because he was never officially on the books, no worker's comp either.

"I don't completely know what happened next, because I was only seven at the time and Mom and Adam refused to talk about it afterwards.  What I do remember is Dad lying in bed all of the time, refusing to talk to anyone and sometimes crying from the pain."  Natalie swallowed hard.  "I think he was in a lot of pain, more than I can even imagine, and I still don't know what Mom did to get that morphine for him.  I do know that she never imagined that he would take it all at one time."

"He killed himself?"

Natalie nodded.  "Mom thinks it was an accident, that he was just in too much pain to know what he was doing.  Adam thinks it was deliberate, that Dad could see how much of a financial drain he was putting on his wife and kids and killed himself to make life easier for us."

She paused and I asked quietly, "What do you think?"

Natalie considered that for a moment.  "I think he knew what he was doing, but that the pain made him rationalize that killing himself would be what was best for us.  It wasn't.  I mean, I love my mom.  She's a great woman.  But I _adored_ my dad.  All of us did.  He was fun and charming and no matter how tired he was at the end of the day, he'd always be ready to go outside with us and throw the ball or wrestle.  Even me –- he didn’t care at all that I was a girl; he treated me just the same as the boys, which I loved, because Mom kept trying to make me do more girly things like get dressed up and play homemaker with dolls.”  Natalie gestured to her scruffy clothes, her no-fuss hairstyle, and her battered boots.  “You can probably guess that I was never really into dress-up or dolls.”

“Neither was I,” I murmured, which was true, as long as you didn’t count doll horses.  I had one hell of a horse phase.

Natalie managed a small smile and reached over to squeeze my arm gently before continuing her story.  “What made Dad’s death especially tragic was that he and my mom were so much in love.  In the evenings, after my brothers and I were supposed to be in bed, we'd sometimes sneak down and see them dancing together in the living room."

She rubbed her eyes, which had been shining with tears for a while, and sniffed quietly.  I stayed silent, not sure what other support I could give her, and wondered if she'd ever told this story before to anyone else.  It sounded raw, not like my own tales of woe, which had grown smooth and practiced as I'd told them to friends and family.

After a couple of minutes Natalie rubbed her eyes again and cleared her throat.  "Anyway," she said in a voice that was still a little watery, "when Dad died, I think Mom broke a little inside.  She didn't smile very much anymore and she spent most of her time at work."  She glanced over at me.  "She was a waitress at the local diner.  Not great pay, but she could pick up as many shifts as she wanted."  I nodded, since she seemed to need some sort of response, and Natalie went back to looking at the sky.  "Thing is, though, waitressing doesn't pay very much and me and my brothers were too young to pick up any work at all to help out."

She seemed to stall there, so I gave her a verbal nudge.  "You were poor."  Only after the words were out of my mouth did I realize that they could be offensive.

Natalie just nodded though.  "Yeah.  I mean, really, truly poor.  The kind of poor where I'd have to use my lunch sack for two or three weeks, until the paper was so shiny with grease that I was embarrassed to take it out at lunchtime.  I 'lost' a lot of sacks, until Mom stopped giving them to me.  After that I'd just tuck my sandwich into my backpack."

"What about welfare?" I asked

"Mom was a proud woman.  Maybe a little too proud.  She refused to ever accept charity from the state, and she'd only take anything from food banks if the only other alternative was no food at all.  That sometimes happened in the winter.

"In the summer, we had a little vegetable garden -- my brothers and I were in charge of it -- and sometimes Mom would bring home leftovers from the diner."  Natalie smiled a little wryly.  "Those were good days.  Most of the time, however, we ate bread."  She shook her head.  "Bread and butter for breakfast, bread and peanut butter for lunch, bread and vegetable soup for dinner.  Every once in a while, if Mom had a good week or if it was a special occasion, she'd buy some jam or some syrup.  The syrup was saved for Sundays, when we'd have pancakes before Mom spent the rest of the day baking the week's bread.  The jam was a special treat that we usually ate in the winter, when we were down to canned vegetables that didn't taste nearly as good as when they were fresh.

"Things got better once Adam was old enough to work after school.  We started to get meat at dinner and didn't have to rely solely on our garden for produce.  We still ate a lot of bread, though, and on lean weeks, when Mom couldn't get enough shifts or when Adam was sick, bread was still all we ate.  When I left home, I swore that I would never voluntarily eat bread again."  She twisted her shoulders.  "And from then to now, I haven't."

"Wow," I said, feeling a little overwhelmed.

"Yeah," Natalie breathed.  "I haven't told many people that story."  She glanced over at me.  "It was good to get it off my chest."

"Yeah?" I asked, a little embarrassed by how pleased that made me feel.

"Yeah," Natalie said with a smile, one that seemed more relaxed than any of the others I'd seen from her before.

Feeling emboldened by that smile, I asked, "So what's your mom doing now?"

The smile disappeared.  "She died a couple of years ago."

_Open mouth, insert foot._   "I'm sorry."

"You didn't know."  She hesitated before adding, "Officially it was a heart attack, but I think part of her died with my dad.  As soon as my brothers and I were able to take care of ourselves, she let herself go."  She smiled a little wistfully.  "I like to think she's with Dad now."

I tried to imagine what it would be like, to love someone that much.  It sounded romantic, but also a little depressing.

We wiled away most of the afternoon in conversation.  Natalie told me about Adam, her eldest brother, who worked two full-time jobs even though he had nearly a million dollars in the bank.  "I think it might be a compulsion for him," Natalie admitted.  "He's so afraid of losing it all in an accident that there will never be enough money in the world for him to feel safe."

Later she told me about Luke, the youngest, who had been the only one of the four to go to college.  Adam and Natalie had footed most of the bill, allowing Luke to focus on his education and eventually graduate with honors and a degree in Actuarial Science.  "He's working for ING now," Natalie said fondly.  "And just a few months ago he got engaged to a pretty Vietnamese girl he met in her mother's restaurant.  They're holding off on the wedding until they can afford to buy a house, but I'll be surprised if her mom doesn't speed up the timeline."

In exchange for her stories, I told her what it was like to grow up with the unexpectedly famous Blythe George.  "The funny thing is, she used to complain all the time about how teachers would meet her for the first time and say, 'Oh, you must be Heather's sister'."  I shook my head in dismay.  "Apparently karma has a sense of humor."

Natalie just laughed.

I did notice that Natalie never mentioned her brother Danny and part of me wondered if that untold story might not also explain Natalie's aversion to drugs.  I didn't push for more, however, as I was doing my own editing.  I wasn't ready to get into the truth about Uncle Doug.  Not yet.  Maybe not ever.

The sun was getting low in the sky when Blade stuck his head out the back door of the bar.  "It's time."

Natalie nodded and climbed off the hammock.  Once Blade went inside, Natalie pulled the flash drive out of her pocket and dropped it in her left boot, before pulling both boots back on.

I got up as well and slid on my sandals, feeling vastly more relaxed than I had when we'd arrived.  For a few hours I'd managed to forget about work and bombs and gun-toting cigar smugglers.  It seemed odd to have an oasis of peace in the middle of a real-life action movie, but then in real life there weren't an endless number of bad guys and the bad guys weren't omniscient.  Of course, in real life the good guys couldn't just hang out in the backyard of Blade's bar-cum-residence for the rest of their lives.  We were going to have to get off the Keys somehow, and with only one road in and out and two very tiny and easily monitored airports to work with, that wasn't going to be easy.   Which was probably why there weren't any bad guys around; why waste time and energy searching for your prey when you could just sit around and wait for your prey to come to you?

That thought brought plenty of tension back, and what I heard when I went inside the bar didn't help either.  "Come on, Angela!" Natalie said heatedly into the phone at her ear.  "You know I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important!"

Judging from her expression, whatever Angela was telling her, it wasn't what she wanted to hear.  "No," she sighed, running her hand through her hair.  "No, you're right.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Thanks.  Stay safe, Ange."  She sighed and hung up.

"They're all going to say that," Blade said mildly as he sat on a stool and took a long pull of beer.  I looked around the completely empty bar with chairs on top of all of the tables and wondered if Blade had even bothered to open today.  He leaned back against the bar, propping his elbows up behind him.  "You know you're going to have to call her.  No one else can help."

Natalie scowled.  "Last resort, man.  Last resort."

Blade lifted a shoulder and drank some more beer, looking mellow and amused.

That amusement just increased over the next hour as Natalie called a remarkably long string of people, all of whom declined to offer any assistance.  I grew more impressed with every phone call; I didn't even _know_ that many people, much less count them all as friends.  Even Blythe would have been hard-pressed to match Natalie's network.

In the end, however, it didn't do any good.  Whoever this David Gilbert guy had pissed off -- and it was getting harder and harder for me to smother my curiosity about who that person was -- apparently every person in the Keys was terrified of him.  With a snarl of frustration, Natalie slammed the phone back down on the bar, then placed her hands on the time-worn edge of the wood and bent her head down beneath them, looking positively defeated.

Blade picked up the phone, gave it a fancy twirl, and then handed it to Natalie with a little _told you so_ smirk.  Natalie took the phone with a sigh and, after a long hesitation, started dialing.  When she was done she just stared at the handset for a moment before bringing it up to her ear.  She covered her face with her free hand as she said, "Hello, Jocelyn."


	9. Chapter 9

I'd been right: Jocelyn was tall, thin, and beautiful.  She still wasn't quite what I expected, though, not blonde and tanned like Natalie, but with skin so dark it was almost black and with hair just a few millimeters shy of shaved, showing off high cheekbones and large, wide-set brown eyes.  Her body was long and lean, and she glided into the bar with a dancer's grace and a self-confidence that spoke of deep inner strength.  She was easily the most stunning woman I'd ever seen in my life.

"Hello, Natalie," she said, moving in to kiss her on the cheek.  Natalie didn't move to reciprocate, but her eyes closed and she swallowed hard.  Someone was clearly still carrying a torch.

I sighed, feeling let down, but also a little relieved.  The universe had realigned to its proper order and my world suddenly made sense again.  It might not be the happiest place, but at least it was familiar.

"And you must be Heather," Jocelyn added, coming up to take my hands.  I was a little distracted by her lack of accent -- someone like her should surely sound as exotic as she looked -- and was caught off guard as she held my arms away from my body and looked me over.  "I've heard a lot about you," she added thoughtfully.

"You have?" I asked, hopefully not sounding as nervous and confused as I felt.

"Oh, yes," she said, lowering my arms and gently brushing a strand of hair off my face.  I felt a rush of heat at her touch that was far too similar to my response to Natalie for my peace of mind.  "Everyone's talking about what you did to Bishop."

Now I just felt appalled.  "They are?"

"Mm-hm.  You know, you're not quite what I expected."

"I'm getting that a lot today."

She laughed; it was a low, husky sound that made both Natalie and Blade sit up a little straighter.  "I can see the appeal," she told Natalie, though her eyes never left mine.  "She's very spunky."

I couldn't decide if I should feel patronized or offended or both.  "Gee, thanks," I said flatly.

Jocelyn patted me on the cheek.  It felt like a caress.

"So," Jocelyn said, suddenly all business.  "Tell me why José Cabrillo wants you dead."

I tried not to be too obvious as I perked up and tucked the name "José Cabrillo" into my brain.

Natalie crossed her arms.  "Because I may or may not have information that will bring him down."

"Which is it?" Jocelyn asked sharply.  "May or may not?"

"I don't know," Natalie said, sounding disgruntled.  "The data's on a flash drive."

"And you haven't opened it yet?" Jocelyn asked, incredulous.  "Is it encrypted?"

"No.  Part of the dead box service is that I don't look at the information they're giving me."

Jocelyn absorbed that with a tiny smile gracing her perfect lips.  "The curiosity must be killing you."

"Why do you think I charge so much?" Natalie muttered.

I glanced over to see Blade watching the two go at it like a tennis match, looking like the only thing he needed to make the entertainment perfect was a box of popcorn. 

Jocelyn set a bag on the table in front of Natalie and started digging through it.  I'd been too caught up in her remarkable beauty to have even noticed the bag before; it was a stylish, soft-sided white leather briefcase that went well with Jocelyn's suit, which was also white and made of some sort of flowing, lightweight material.  She wasn't wearing a shirt underneath the jacket.  Not many women can pull off head-to-toe white, but the color contrasted beautifully against Jocelyn's dark skin and she carried off the entire outfit with the confidence of a movie star.

After a few minutes of searching that I suspected was done entirely for effect, Jocelyn produced a tablet computer and passed it over to Natalie.

"No," Natalie said.

"We have to know," Jocelyn said gently, rubbing Natalie's arm with one hand.  "Your client would understand.  You've already gone far beyond what any reasonable person would expect." 

My eyes went of their own accord to where Jocelyn was touching Natalie.  Jocelyn’s fingers were as long and perfect as the rest of her.  _Why the hell isn't she a model?_ I wondered, with more than a hint of bitchiness.  _Preferably in New York._ Then I blinked.  That might just have been the most stereotypically female thought I'd ever had in my entire life.

Natalie huffed.  "You always were good at rationalizing."

I would've taken offense if someone had said that to me, but Jocelyn just tilted her head to the side and said softly, "You always were a little too good for this job.  But, Natalie, how much is that moral high ground worth to you?  Are you willing to die for it?  Are you willing to let Heather die?"

I twitched at the sound of my name, wondering exactly how I ended up in this conversation.  Natalie shot me a pensive glance.  I lifted my shoulders, hopefully projecting that I had no idea what to do.

Natalie swore volubly and snatched the tablet. 

As she wrestled with her boot, I sneaked forward to get a better angle on the computer.  Blade stayed where he was.  When I glanced back with a questioning look, he just shook his head and went around to the other side of the bar where he hunted out a bottle of tequila.

Less than reassured by that response but still curious as hell, I joined Natalie and Jocelyn at the table just in time to see Natalie finally retrieve the flash drive from her boot.  Hovering a couple of steps back, I watched as she plugged the drive in and waited impatiently for it to load.  Finally, the dialogue box opened, containing a single folder.  Natalie and Jocelyn exchanged a look -- I gritted my teeth -- and then Natalie tapped the screen, opening the folder.

Inside were dozens of documents, pictures, and even a few audio and video files, nearly a hundred in total, each one with a filename that seemed to me to be a random collection of letters and numbers.

"Those are case file numbers," Jocelyn said.

"That's the format the DEA uses," Natalie added.

_That can’t be good_ , I noted.

A quick perusal of the first few files turned up no obvious leads, aside from the unsurprising fact that all of them seemed to be connected to the guy who wanted Natalie dead.

"Who is José Cabrillo, anyway?"  Maybe not the most graceful way to ask the question, but I'd run out of patience.

Jocelyn and Natalie exchanged _another_ look.

"He's a drug smuggler," Natalie finally said.

Jocelyn made a dismissive noise.  "He's so much more than that," she said.  "Most of the prostitution east of the Mississippi is giving him a cut, he's running arms out of Miami and New Orleans, and anytime there's a major sporting event he can tell you two weeks in advance who is going to win and, if the game is big enough, the spread." 

"But most of his money comes from drugs," Natalie cut in.  "He brings in millions of dollars' worth of cocaine every month and he's never once been caught.  Rumor on the street is that he has a DEA agent in his pocket.  One of these case files must implicate that agent."

"That's why they put a hundred thousand dollar contract out on you?" I asked doubtfully.  "To protect a single DEA agent?"

Jocelyn let out a little mocking laugh.  "An inside man at the DEA, who can report on the progress of any investigation that involves Cabrillo or his competitors?  He'd be worth his weight in uncut blow.  Even if there was a _million_ dollar price tag on Natalie's head, if it kept his informant safe it would be a bargain for Cabrillo."

"But it's not really Natalie they're after, is it?  Don't they just need the flash drive?"

Natalie sighed.  "I have an eidetic memory.  It's documented and verifiable, which means I can testify in court.  Not as good as hard copies, but … "  She shrugged.  "Of course, this would be a moot point if I _hadn't seen the documents_."  She turned to glare at Jocelyn.

She waved her hand dismissively.  "No one who knows you would believe that you hadn't opened the drive.  Besides, you know how José feels about loose ends."

Judging from Natalie's expression, José really didn't like loose ends.  And though no one had said it out loud yet, I had a sneaking suspicion that I counted as a loose end, too.

"So what now?" I asked, feeling an odd combination of scared and exhausted.

"Now we get you to the authorities," Jocelyn said.  "The only question is, _which_ authorities."

"Not Washington," Natalie said quietly.

"Unfortunately not," Jocelyn said with a sigh as she pulled up an internet browser on the tablet and started typing on the screen. "All José would need is a sniper and this would all be over.  Which is a shame, because I really do need to touch base with some of my people there."

_My people?_   I glanced back at Blade, hoping for some clarification or, failing that, someone to sympathize with my confusion, but neither the man nor his tequila were anywhere in sight.

Part of me immediately turned suspicious.  The more rational part of me pointed out that Blade had had plenty of time during the day to betray us.  More like the man was deliberately keeping himself ignorant of any facts that might get him killed.  _Which would make him a smarter person than me_ , I thought morosely. 

"There's an FBI field office in Miami," I offered.  "I think it's big enough to have a section chief."

"No," Natalie said, looking over Jocelyn's shoulder at the tablet.  "Miami is Cabrillo's base of operations.  We'd be dead before we could get through the lobby."

I felt a little relieved at that, because I really was hoping they'd go for my second choice: "What about Atlanta?"

Jocelyn paused in her typing and she and Natalie had another silent meeting of the minds.  "That's a good idea," Natalie said.  "I don't think José does much business in Atlanta."

"One of his lieutenants runs the area," Jocelyn said thoughtfully.  "Andre.  Smart man.  Third in command overall, but he's been doing some quiet subcontractor work for a while, building up his own client base.  He's done some work for me; I'm sure he could be persuaded that it's in his best interests for José to disappear, especially if we can bring down Jed at the same time."

Natalie, apparently seeing my confusion, clarified: "Jose's second in command."

"José's second in command is named _Jed_?" I asked incredulously.

"We can't control what our parents name us," Natalie said.

"Speak for yourself," Jocelyn said with a knowing smile.  "You two stay here; I need to make some calls."  Tucking her computer away, she headed out the door, leaving Natalie and me alone.

"Good call with the Atlanta office," Natalie said, moving over to sit on one of the barstools next to me.  "That must've been one well-researched story."

I shrugged, not wanting to discuss Mulder or Scully at the moment.  Natalie frowned at me.  "You okay?"

"I'm fine."  What else could I say? 

Natalie continued to frown.  When I refused to look up to meet her eyes, she cleared her throat, sounding uncomfortable.  "Well, it'll all be over soon."

"That's good," I said thickly.  After a moment, I lied, "I'm glad to hear it."

"Yeah," Natalie said, and for some reason her voice sounded a little strained.  "Me, too."


	10. Chapter 10

Jocelyn came back in a few minutes later, interrupting an uncomfortable silence that I hadn't wanted to break.  "Okay," she said.  "Everything's arranged.  We'll be taking my jet out of Key West."

_Of course she has a jet_ , I thought wearily, even as Natalie asked sharply, "We?"

"You didn't think I was going to let you have all the fun, did you?" Jocelyn asked archly.  "Besides, I have a friend in Atlanta.  I thought now would be a good time to ... catch up."  She smirked.

I thought about Paul, my own friend in Atlanta.  What I was hoping to get from him didn't involve much in the way of suggestive pauses; mostly I just figured I'd need a shoulder to cry on when this was all over.  If we'd gone to Washington D.C., that shoulder would have been my mom's, which would have been easier in some ways, but also harder in others.  Paul never judged me and, at that precise moment in time, non-judgmental caring was something I craved.

Still looking disgruntled, Natalie asked how we were getting to the airport.  "By limo, of course," Jocelyn said, sounding like she couldn't conceive of another form of transport.

For some reason, Natalie looked appalled at the idea.  "No."

"It's the only way," Jocelyn said, sternly.  "And you really aren't in a position to complain."

"I've never ridden in a limo," I volunteered.

Jocelyn and Natalie both shot me identical pitying looks.  I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek and swore I wasn't going to talk to either of them ever again.

That resolution didn't even last the twenty minutes it took for Jocelyn's limo to arrive.  Jocelyn spent most of that time on the phone; shortly after calling for her limo, she'd gotten a call from someone named George, who apparently wanted "the usual".  Jocelyn tsked in reply.  "George, how many times have I told you, you have to pick your clients better?"

While she listened to the response, I waged a brief battle with my curiosity.  Curiosity won and I leaned over to Natalie, who had a disgusted look on her face.  "Who's George and what's 'the usual'?"

"George is a loan shark," Natalie said, a growl audible even though she kept her voice low.  "And 'the usual' is when one of her goons takes some poor bastard out into the Everglades and breaks his arms and legs."

My eyes shot over to Jocelyn, who was smirking at me as she wrapped up the phone call.  "Don't forget the dislocated thumb," she added after she hung up.  "Or the blackballing."

I looked over to Natalie for an explanation.  "She has the shmuck blackballed from every gambling operation in the state."

"In the country, now," Jocelyn clarified.  "Though what Natalie isn't telling you is that, before I started offering this service, George would take his delinquent debtors out to the Everglades and disembowel them.  If they were lucky, they'd bleed to death before the alligators found them."

I swallowed hard at that, but curiosity compelled me to note, "That sounds like it'd be cheaper than paying you."

Jocelyn shrugged gracefully and, already dialing again, answered: "He's discovered that the threat of never gambling again is more effective for some clients than the threat of death.  That keeps him happy and the client alive.  Everyone wins."

The new call was apparently for issuing orders against a Harold Rivera.  Whoever poor Harold was, I hoped he had good health insurance.

Finally the limo did arrive, distracting me from Jocelyn's business affairs.  It was long and sleek and looked positively amazing and I couldn't help but feel a little thrill at the thought that I was going to get to ride inside.  "Wow," I murmured.

Jocelyn hung up her phone and stepped outside to open the trunk with a flourish.  "Here we go."

The little thrill died an unpleasant death.  I glanced inside the very tiny trunk, then over at Natalie, hoping to see her laughing.  She wasn't.  "You've got to be kidding me," I said.  "Again?"

"They'll be checking the inside of the car," Natalie said apologetically.

"And they aren't going to be checking the trunk?"

"Actually, they probably will," Jocelyn cut in.  "Which is why I had this installed a few years ago."  She leaned in and pressed the back wall of the trunk.  To my surprise, it popped out a few inches, allowing her to reach her fingers behind it and pull it away, revealing a space a little larger than the trunk in my Saturn.  Emphasis on _little_.

I turned to Natalie.  "There's no way we'll fit in there."

"Sure you will," Jocelyn said brightly.  "It'll just be a tight fit, that's all.  Natalie, you go in first."

Natalie turned to me and took my hands.  "I'm sorry," she said, squeezing them gently.  "She's right.  It really is the only way."

I fought hard against being placated, but her hands were so warm and I was so very touch starved ... I sighed.  "How long?"

"An hour, tops," Jocelyn promised, like that was a short period of time.  For her, it probably would be; she wasn't the one playing a sardine in an undersized can.

"It'll be over before you know it," Natalie promised.

I stared at her balefully, but nodded.  She grinned and, to my complete and utter shock, leaned forward and kissed me.

It wasn't much of a kiss, little more than a brief brush of lips.  A peck, really.  Not even worth mentioning really, if it hadn't been my first kiss ever.

_I've just been kissed_ , I thought to myself, just barely controlling the urge to touch my lips.  Then doubt inevitably crept in.  Why had she kissed me?  Was it just the heat of the moment?  Gratitude, perhaps, for not making more of a fuss about getting in the trunk?  Or maybe --

"Heather?"

I blinked and looked over to find Natalie wedged in the back of the hidden compartment, facing forward.  Both she and Jocelyn were staring at me.

"Sorry," I said quickly, feeling my cheeks burn.  "Sorry."

"Are you sure you're okay with this?" Natalie asked from the trunk.

"Do I have any other options?" I asked.

"No," Jocelyn said.

"Then I guess I'm okay with it."  I stepped forward, doing my best to hide my reluctance, and was about to climb into the trunk when Jocelyn stopped me.

"Before you get in, I want you to have these."  From her bottomless bag, she produced two handguns.  One she handed over to Natalie, who expertly checked to see if it was loaded.  The other one she handed to me.

I took it a little doubtfully.  "What caliber is it?"

"A .22."

"And where's the safety?"

Jocelyn narrowed her eyes.  "I understood you knew how to use a handgun."

"I've only gone shooting twice," I admitted.  "And only once with handguns.  But the guy who took me said I had pretty good aim."  Jocelyn still didn't look convinced, so I added, "On the gun he let me use, the safety was on the side here."  Turning the gun over I found the catch right where it had been on the other gun.  "And on his, down meant that the safety was off."

"This one's just the same."

I nodded and flipped the safety on before looking for the button to eject the clip.  Once I found it, it was an easy matter to pop the magazine out, check to make sure that it contained bullets, and then ram it back in.  After a moment's consideration, I pulled back the slide, just to be on the safe side.  Sure enough, an ejected bullet went flying through the air.  Jocelyn rolled her eyes, but retrieved it without comment. 

Once I was in the trunk but not yet squeezed back into the compartment, Jocelyn leaned over us.  "Rule one: do not shoot my boys."

"Yes, yes," Natalie said, sounding annoyed.  Or, considering her cramped position, just ready to get on with it.  "Usual signal?"

"Sounds good.  Heather, honey, I need you to move back now."

_Oh, this was going to suck_.  I took a deep breath and inched back, trying very hard to keep from pressing anywhere too intimate on Natalie’s body.  It was slow going, since I had to go in backwards and couldn't really see where I was supposed to fit.

Jocelyn crossed her arms and tapped one finger rapidly against her bicep.  After a couple of minutes of wiggling on my part, she huffed.  "We don't have time for this," she said flatly.  Without any further warning, she leaned into the trunk and _shoved_ me back into Natalie, who let out a surprised _oof_.

"Perfect!" Jocelyn said brightly, before pushing the fake wall in place.  In the interest in not losing my nose or skinning my knees, I had to inch back even further and somehow in the process I ended up with Natalie's arm over my waist.

I held my breath.  On the other side of the fake wall came a few muffled thumps.  Probably some sort of luggage to disguise how small the trunk was.

"You all right?" Natalie whispered.

I was definitely not all right.  My lungs hurt, my gun was digging into my hip, and my legs were already starting to cramp.  I was the very _antithesis_ of all right.  Of course, I couldn't say that while holding my breath, so I just nodded.  In the dark she couldn't see me, but I figured she could feel the back of my head rubbing up and down against her nose.

"Sure?" Natalie asked, sounding unconvinced.  She shifted her arm over my waist and I could feel the handle of her gun dig into my stomach.  “Sorry, sorry,” she said, when I grunted in discomfort.  She shifted around a bit and somehow her hands ended up right under my breasts.

I stopped breathing.

"Heather?"

_Find a topic, find a topic, find a topic._   "Trivia!" I gasped.

"Um … "

"To pass the time!  We could ask each other trivia questions!"

In the silence that followed, I could hear the car start up.  At that first bit of acceleration Natalie rocked against me; and I felt her pressed up behind me from my neck all the way down to my calves.  I found myself holding my breath again as I forced myself to stay perfectly still.  Unfortunately, with my heart racing like a train I couldn’t hold my breath very long and it squeaked coming out of my throat.

"Sorry," Natalie muttered and she shifted a bit so that her breasts weren’t pressing quite so firmly against my shoulder blades.  I didn't dare relax, however, and kept my body rigidly in place.  Natalie cleared her throat.  "So, trivia."

"Trivia," I agreed, and was grateful that my voice was only pitched just a little bit too high.  "I'll start."  Except that my brain had apparently stalled, because for the life of me I couldn't come up with a single bit of esoteric knowledge.  "Never mind, you start."

"You sure?" Natalie said, and I couldn't be sure but I thought she was teasing me.  "Never mind.  What are the colors of the rainbow, in order?"

I scoffed.  "Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Which we learn in the _second grade_.  What are the planets of the solar system?"

"Like that's much better," Natalie retorted.  "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.  Except actually not Pluto anymore, because they revoked its planet status a few years ago."

"Which was totally stupid," I commented.

"Why?  It didn't meet the definition of a planet."

"It didn't meet the _new_ definition of a planet.  If you're going to redefine what a planet is, you should at least grandfather in objects that had been classified as planets for _hundreds of years_."

"There are several other objects in the solar system that are bigger than Pluto," Natalie pointed out.  "If you're going to keep Pluto as a planet, you have to include the others."

I rolled my eyes.  "Where have I heard that before?  Oh, wait!  Isn't that a direct quote from the IAU conference?"

"Maybe," Natalie said defensively.  "What?  It was an interesting debate.  Besides, Pluto hasn't been known as a planet for hundreds of years.  A few decades, maybe, but not centuries."

I shook my head, but I was smiling.  In the heat of the argument I'd forgotten to hold myself still and the tiny space was a little more comfortable when I was relaxed against Natalie.  The key, I was discovering, was to not let myself think too much.  "Let's agree to disagree.  Your turn to ask a question."

"You just don't want to admit you're wrong," Natalie said, but she didn't sound very serious and after just a moment she added, "What's the chemical formula for water?"  I let out an indignant huff and she laughed.  "Kidding, kidding.  How about the chemical formula for sugar?"

Which was only slightly better, but I answered, "C6H12O6.  What's the birthstone for October?"

"Ooo, playing a little tougher now.  Opal.  Also, is that a hint?"

"October 14," I admitted.  "Yours?"

"January 1."

I tried to look over my shoulder, remembered that that wasn't a good idea, and then tried to put all of my surprise in my voice.  "Really?  First baby of the new year?"

"Ah, no.  More like thirty-second.  Apparently a lot of pregnant women who are due around that time get induced on December 31, hoping for a New Year's baby."

"Did your mom get induced?"

"She said not, but between you and me, I have my suspicions."

I smiled to myself.  Whispering secrets in the dark, it was hard to remember that just a half an hour earlier I'd been seething with jealousy.  Which was not a productive line of thinking.  "Your question."

We shared questions back and forth for most of the drive.  Natalie got more of them right than I did, but my questions were more creative.  My favorite was: "What's the price of tea in China?"  Natalie had considered that for a moment before answering, "Fuck.  Now I'm going to have to look that up."  I'd grinned.

Along the way I also managed to get some answers to important questions, such as what "the usual signal" was and what we were going to do once we got to Atlanta.  I'd personally been in favor of going straight to the FBI, but Natalie convinced me that it was best to go during the day, when the office was full of agents.  If nothing else, it minimized the chances of us running into a crooked one without having witnesses around.

"Is law enforcement really so corrupt?" I asked.  "From the way you guys talk, I'd be surprised to find any straight agents at all."

"It's not so bad," Natalie said.  "And you have to remember that there's corrupt and then there's _corrupt_.  Jocelyn and I both have contacts in law enforcement.  Mine are usually the people I sell information to.  Sometimes I request information in return, but it's never anything that will undermine an investigation or put someone in danger, and I don't pay for it."  For some reason she sounded very intense as she said that, almost as if she was worried about me judging her actions.  "Favors like those benefit both sides," she added.  "I get information that helps my business run smoothly, and they get to have me in their debt, which serves them well when they need important information from me. 

"Jocelyn's contacts tend to be more ... morally flexible.  They sell information to her, sometimes high-level information, and they do what they can to kill any investigations that might implicate her.  In return, and in addition to whatever money she pays them, she throws them the occasional criminal.  Usually it's a business rival, but if she hears about a pimp abusing his girls, she'll have him taken out."

"How is that any different than what José Cabrillo does?"

"That's one of the things Jocelyn and I fought about," Natalie admitted.  "But it's a matter of scale.  Jocelyn's a facilitator: if you need something but don't know who will have it, Jocelyn will hook you up with the right person.  Or, if you need to make a deal with someone you don't trust, Jocelyn will act as a neutral middleman.  Stuff like that.  Mostly what Jocelyn is paying her contacts for is to keep her name out of investigations into other people.  Jocelyn's only paid to make a deal happen -- if the law gets involved after that it's outside her province."

"And that doesn't cause her problems with the criminal element she works with?"

"I think it probably did at first," Natalie said, "but that's before she and I met.  These days people know they can take Jocelyn on her terms or go elsewhere.  And since she's the best at what she does – "

" – and conveniently has her competition taken out – " I muttered.

" – most people choose to work with her."

I absorbed that.  "What about Cabrillo?  What does he have his contacts do?"

"Honestly?  I wouldn't be surprised if his pet DEA agent was carrying out assassinations."

"Really?"

"Yeah.  Once Cabrillo gets his claws into you, he owns you."

Again I wished I could look back, but the compartment hadn't gotten any bigger.  I compromised by awkwardly patting the arm that was still draped over my waist.  "Sounds like you have personal experience dealing with him."

Natalie let out a humorless chuckle.  "Not me personally, or I wouldn't be here today.  Friends of mine, though -- I've lost a few of them to Cabrillo and his cartel."

"So this is personal for you."

Natalie shifted against me in what might have been a shrug and I realized that, even though we were now curled up together as tight as two spoons in a drawer, my heart rate had finally gone down enough that I wasn’t risking a stroke.  Part of me was actually sad at the loss, but the rest of me was infinitely grateful that Natalie was so good at making me feel comfortable around her.

Of course, it probably didn’t hurt that we were discussing the least sexy topic imaginable.

"Let's just say that taking Cabrillo out would be doing the world a favor,” Natalie said.

"But what about the contract on your life?"

Natalie stayed silent for so long that I thought she might not answer at all and when she finally did speak, she sounded anything but convinced by her own words.  "It's possible that the contract will go away once he's behind bars."

"Possible?  How possible?"  This time Natalie didn't answer and I felt my stomach knot.  "Are you going to have to go into witness protection?"

"I might," Natalie said after a hesitation.  "Guys like Cabrillo don't take well to losing."

"Oh."  I kept my eyes forward and stared intently, even though there was nothing to see but the inky blackness that surrounded us.

"Heather – " Natalie started.

I never did find out what she intended to say because just then we felt the limo slow down.  I took a couple of quick breaths and swallowed the lump that had taken up residence in my throat before I was able to say, "Think we're at the airport?"

"Probably," Natalie whispered.  "Get ready, just in case."

A jolt of adrenaline rushed through me at her words and I felt my hands shaking just a bit as I worked my gun up from my hip to my chest, where I carefully felt the safety to make sure it was off.  "Please don't make me shoot anyone," I breathed, almost silently.  "Please, please don't make me shoot anyone."

Natalie's arm tightened for a moment, giving me a squeeze.  "It's going to be all right," she murmured.  "If anyone needs to be shot, I'll do it."

Which was a nice thing to say and all, but I was the one in front.  If any shooting was needed, I'd either have to do it or be in the unenviable position of being the human shield.

Outside I could hear the muffled sounds of conversation, and then the clatter of a key being pushed into the trunk lock.  Natalie's arm tightened against me again and I was abruptly aware of the fact that the handle of my gun was slowly getting slick with the clammy sweat from my palm.  Every breath I breathed sounded louder and louder until I stopped breathing altogether as the sounds of suitcases being shifted filtered through the flimsy wall separating us from the unknown.

_We're-gon-na-make-it, we're-gon-na-make-it_ , I thought in time with the beats of my heart.

My burning lungs couldn't take it anymore and I finally opened my mouth to silently let out the stale air in my chest.  Hot, humid air flavored with the scents of two people in close confines swept into the vacuum and I felt my chest push up against Natalie's arm.  A moment later I felt something soft and dry brush against my neck.  It almost felt like a kiss.

The trunk slammed shut and I started back against Natalie.  She let out a pained noise and I was about to hiss an apology when she shifted her gun hand from my stomach to my mouth.  Apparently I needed to stay quiet, though I'll admit I had a semi-hysterical urge to lick the fingers pressing against my lips.

The car shifted back into motion, rocking me back into Natalie.  I was too emotionally exhausted to get worked up this time around; judging by the way her arm settled back around my waist, she didn't mind.

After what seemed like a very long drive considering the probable size of the airport, someone tapped out shave-and-a-hair-cut against the roof of the trunk, tossing in four extra knocks at the end instead of two.  Behind me, I felt Natalie relax; that was the signal.

Now that the end was in sight, the compartment felt tinier than ever and I had to fight the urge to shift restlessly as I heard the sounds of the trunk being unloaded.  Finally, _finally_ someone popped the fake wall and pulled it out.

Never before had the air of Key West in the summertime felt so cool and sweet and I breathed in great gulps of it as I dragged myself out of the trunk.  Natalie was close behind, and, I was secretly pleased to note, just as hot and sweaty-looking as I was.  "Never again," she told Jocelyn, who was standing next to the trunk, looking highly entertained.

"I make no promises," she smirked.  "Come on, into the plane before someone sees you."

I ran towards the plane, making it a whole three steps before Natalie outstripped me.  _I swear, when this is all over, I'm burning these shoes._    She stopped at the door, but I waved her on as I huffed my way up the steps.

As I entered the plane, the first thing I saw was Natalie standing between the seats and watching the door.  The moment I stepped through, she smiled and, to my bemusement, her ears turned pink.  "Hey."

"Hi," I said, suddenly feeling shy.

"Hello to both of you," Jocelyn chimed in.  My shyness and, unfortunately, much of my pleasure fled.  "Take your seats.  The plane's taking off the moment the runway is clear.  Natalie, this is for you."  She handed over a small white pill.

I looked at the pill and then over to Natalie, who was staring at the drug as if it was a snake that was about to bite her.  "No."

"Yes," Jocelyn said.  "This is not a pleasure cruise; we don't have time for you to psych yourself up for the flight."

Natalie scowled, but took the pill and dry swallowed it.  I blinked a few times, then belatedly settled into my seat and looked around, trying to act like I wasn't desperately curious.

Unlike the private planes I'd seen in movies, there were no open spaces or swivel chairs or couches in this jet.  In fact, it looked just like a smaller version of the commercial planes I've been in, mostly filled by three rows of two seats each, with the aisle running between the seats.  I was seriously disappointed, even more so when Natalie chose to sit in the seat behind me, rather than next to me.

My disappointment was quickly alleviated, however, when Natalie reached around my chair and pulled a handle and I discovered that my seat could swivel after all.  By the time the plane had started to move, Natalie and I were sitting side by side, looking across the tiny aisle at Jocelyn, who'd turned her seat as well as the ones next to her, giving her plenty of room to make piles from her briefcase of papers.  She was already on the phone again, though this phone was bigger and bulkier and came from a handset next to her seat.

It was funny; we spent all that time talking when we were alone, but the moment another person was added to the mix, neither Natalie nor I had a thing to say.  It didn't help that Jocelyn was eying us both from her seat across the aisle, her perfect lips curved up in a slight smile as she listened to whatever the person on the other side of the call was saying.

As we approached the runway, I suddenly felt a hand grasp mine.  Surprised, I glanced over to see Natalie white-faced, with her eyes squeezed shut, and was baffled for a moment before I remembered: heights.  She was afraid of heights.  Hence the pill, which probably hadn't fully kicked in yet.

Feeling a wave of fondness wash over me, I carefully eased my hand over until I could thread my fingers through hers.  Natalie opened her eyes for a moment, looking surprised.  "It's okay," I murmured, doing my best to project support and understanding.  Her eyes met mine and they locked as the plane accelerated down the runway and lifted off into the air.

Jocelyn started clapping the moment we were airborne, causing both Natalie and me to start.  Natalie abruptly let go of my hand and I rubbed my face, feeling overly hot and a little overwhelmed.  "Best takeoff to date," Jocelyn said, brightly.  "We'll make a flier out of you yet."

Natalie shot her a filthy look, but Jocelyn didn't seem to notice as her attention had turned to me.  "Heather, you'll find a suitcase in the luggage bin in the back if you'd like to get changed."

I glanced at Natalie, who shrugged and nodded.  Warily I undid my seat belt and went where directed.  Sure enough, there was a very familiar suitcase there and, when I opened it, I found it full of some very familiar clothes.  "What the – "

"I sent someone to your apartment," Jocelyn said, as if that wasn't a massive invasion of privacy -- _and how did she even know where I lived?_ \-- adding blithely, "I figured you'd want your own clothes.  Your mom was there, by the way."

I snapped around with narrowed eyes.  "If you hurt my mom – "

"She's fine," Jocelyn said, for once looking completely serious.  "My men informed her that you were fine and then moved her to a safer location.  If you'd like to call her, there's a phone in the bathroom.  Just be careful about how much information you give her."

"Right," I said, feeling my eyes burn.  At that moment, I quite liked Jocelyn, despite everything.  "Thank you."

"No problem," Jocelyn said.  "Take your time; we've got a few hours before we land."

I nodded and swallowed thickly as I made my way to the bathroom, suitcase in hand. 

Unlike the cabin, the bathroom was very different from the airline bathrooms I'd been in before.  First was the size: not only could I fit in the bathroom without crouching, I had enough room to lay out my suitcase on the floor and even open it, as long as the top of the case rested against the wall.  Compared to commercial airlines, this was positively luxurious.  Even more so when I saw that the toilet lid was padded on top; I could sit on it in comfort while changing my clothes.  Added to all of this was the fact that the sink actually had a bit of counter space, and in the corner was a small closet with a pile of hand towels and washcloths. 

Best of all, however, was the bulky phone on the wall next to the sink.  Once I'd gotten over my initial awe, I dumped my suitcase in the corner and made a beeline for the phone.  Silently thanking my mom for not changing her cell phone number for over a decade, I dialed and waited impatiently for her to pick up, which she did on the second ring.  " _Hello?_ "

My eyes burned.  "Hi, Mom.  It's me."

" _Heather?_ " 

Suddenly we were both crying.  "Yeah, Mom.  It's me.  I'm safe.  Well," I sniffed.  "Sort of.  But it's been a really long couple of days."

" _Oh, sweetpea, we've been so worried about you.  Joe's coming down tomorrow and Blythe is trying to get out of her classes for next week so she can come, too._ "

I groaned at the thought and asked, "Mom, why are you in Miami, anyway?"

" _I got a call from the police!_ "

I winced.  "You did?"

" _Yes!  When you didn't show up for work on Wednesday and you didn't answer your phone, your supervisor thought you might've been killed in that car bomb on South Beach!  Since I'm your emergency contact, they called me._ "

"And you flew right down?" I asked, feeling ridiculously touched.

" _Of course.  And Joe and Blythe will be coming soon._ "

"They shouldn't do that, Mom.  There's nothing they can do."  I thought about what I just said.  "Unless you want them there, of course.  Just ... keep in mind that it's not a hundred percent safe for you all in Miami."

There was an ominous pause.  " _And why is that?  What've you gotten yourself into?_ "

I laughed, though the sound was tinged with hysteria.  "I can't tell you, I swear I can't.  Honestly, I'm having a tough time believing it all myself.  But it's nothing I did wrong, I promise.  Just the worst case of wrong place at the wrong time ever."

A pause while Mom took that in, undoubtedly as frustrated at the vagueness as I was.  " _Is anyone there with you?_ " she finally asked. 

I shook my head.  At least she was consistent; Mom had been pushing for me to be more social since I was in high school.  "Yes, Mom, I'm with someone.  Two someones at the moment.  No one you know.  Though, I did realize something -- I think I might not be destined to be single forever after all."

" _That's wonderful,_ " she said.  " _Not that I would ever push,_ " ha! " _but I think you don't realize how lonely you are._ "  She paused, probably picturing my reaction to that comment, before adding, " _I just want you to be happy._ "

What could I say to that, but: "I know, Mom.  Thank you."  I cleared my throat and added, "I should probably go; this is one of those plane phones and you know how much those cost."

" _Okay, sweetie.  Take care._ "

"I will.  I love you and I'll talk to you soon."

" _I love you, too_.  _Bye_."

"Bye."

I hung up the phone reluctantly, and wondered if I could get away with calling anyone else.  Blythe would have been my first choice, but she'd switched to her fiancé's phone plan after I'd gotten my cell phone and I didn't even know the area code of her new number, much less the number itself.  I could call Paul, as he was still using the number he had when he first moved to Atlanta, but as far as I knew he'd managed to stay clear of the mess my life had currently become.  If Jocelyn and Cabrillo didn't know about Paul, I wasn't about take the risk of putting him on their radar.

Which left ... no one.  My dad was dead, not that I would have called him anyway.  I did have an aunt and a cousin in Utah that I was fairly close to, but my cousin never answered the phone and the casual, meandering conversations I had with my aunt never translated well over the phone.  Outside of Paul, I had no long-term friends: I'd lived in six different states since graduating college ten years before and I hadn't successfully kept up with any of the few acquaintances I'd made in each new home.

Maybe my mom had a point about how isolated I'd become.

Nothing that I could do about that at the moment, however, so I pushed those thoughts aside and focused on the practical.   The suitcase that Jocelyn had provided was actually more of a carry-on; I'd packed up everything I owned often enough in my life that I could easily fit a full week's worth of clothes in the bag.  Apparently Jocelyn's people weren't so skilled: the bag contained exactly one pair each of dress pants, jeans, and shorts, a few pairs of underwear, a handful of bras -- I didn't even want to think about Jocelyn's goons digging through my underwear and bra drawer -- and a few shirts.  No socks and no shoes, so apparently the burning of the sandals was going to have to wait a little bit longer.

I wasn't sure how much water a plane could have on-board, even a fancy private plane, so I kept it as quick as I could.  The biggest challenge was washing my hair in the elegant but itty-bitty bathroom sink.  It helped that there were cups in the bathroom, though the fact that they were real glass put me in perpetual fear that I'd accidentally drop one.  Still, I was careful and managed to get my hair washed and the essential parts of my body cleaned up without breaking anything or running out of water, so all in all I was counting it as a win.

Feeling refreshed and vastly more human than I had since the car bomb had detonated two days before, I stepped out of the bathroom and into the main cabin.

Where I found Natalie and Jocelyn sitting in the same chair, Jocelyn straddling Natalie's lap.


	11. Chapter 11

As far as I could tell, neither Natalie nor Jocelyn saw me.  I retreated back to the bathroom and locked the door behind me before sliding down the wall to sit on the floor.

If someone had asked me the week before if I was a jealous person, I'd probably have said no and thought I was being honest.  What the last few hours forced me to face, however, was the fact that I'd been lying to myself. 

Truth was, I was tired of having everyone in my life be more important to me than I was to them.  I was tired of being just one of many friends to Paul, when he's my best – and only – significant friend.  I was tired of being just a niece to my aunt, when she was my favorite person in the whole state of Utah.  I was tired of my mom asking me if there wasn't anyone else I could call when I wanted to talk.  I was tired of my sister only answering the phone when she was bored or when she was fighting with her fiancé.  I was tired of – honestly I was just tired, full stop.  And after the last few days, I was too tired to keep pretending to myself that I didn't care.

I don't know how long I sat there feeling miserable and lonely before Natalie called through the door to check on me, sounding worried.

"I'm fine," I called, hastily wiping my wet cheeks.  "I'll be out in a second."

"Okay," Natalie said, sounding unconvinced.  "Shout if you need anything."

"I will," I lied. 

When I exited the bathroom this time, I found Natalie and Jocelyn sitting in their own chairs on opposite sides of the plane.  "How much longer to Atlanta?" I asked politely as I settled into my own seat without looking either of them in the face.

"Not too far," Jocelyn said.  "The pilot originally filed a flight plan to Washington, so we'll have to fake a medical emergency to get diverted to Atlanta.  Any preference?"

Apparently I was going to be the lucky victim.  "Just say I passed out," I suggested wearily.  "That way we don't have to worry about getting our story straight."

"It's just for the control tower," Jocelyn said dismissively.  "I've already arranged for a friend of mine to pick us up.  She's an EMT."

I just nodded.

"Are you sure you're all right?" Natalie asked.  "You were in there for a long time."

"I'm fine," I answered, avoiding her eyes.  "I was just enjoying the chance to get clean."

Natalie frowned a little and glanced over at Jocelyn.  This didn't seem to be one of their sharing moments, however, as she immediately turned back and whispered, "Are you angry about something?"

I blinked a few times in surprise.  No one had ever noticed when I was angry before, at least not since I was a kid.  Even when I _wanted_ it to be noticed, no one ever did.  "No," I lied.  Then, to get her to stop asking, I added, "How are you doing?"

She stared at me incredulously.  "Do you even realize what you're doing?"

I looked over at Jocelyn, who wasn't even trying to hide her interest.  "Apparently not."

"Why won't you – "  She cut herself off, looking frustrated.  Unbuckling her seat belt, she got to her feet and said in a tight voice, "I just want to help."  Without saying another word she stomped off into the bathroom.  I watched her go until she shut the door behind her.  Apparently that pill was working now; she didn't seem at all uncomfortable about moving through the cabin.

When I turned back, I found Jocelyn watching me.  "You know," she started, sounding thoughtful.  "Helping people is very much a part of Natalie's makeup."  She laughed a little.  "Used to drive me nuts, because if I need help, I'll ask for it, but she kept asking me anyway."

I made a noncommittal noise, not sure what she was trying to say.

Jocelyn considered me for a moment.  "I didn't like it," she said abruptly.  "I found her constant need to help stifling.  But not everyone is like me."  She stopped as if waiting for me to say something.  After a minute, she let out an aggrieved sounding sigh.  "So if you happen to know _anyone_ who has a tough time asking for _help_ ," she said, staring at me pointedly, "you might inform _that person_ that Natalie might be a _good match_ for _her_."

I gaped at her.  "Um, okay?"

"You are unbelievably dense," Jocelyn muttered.

"But I thought you still wanted her," I continued as if I hadn't heard.  "I, uh, saw you before.  On her lap."

"Ah."  Jocelyn leaned back in her seat, steepling her fingers in front of her.  "That was a misunderstanding."

"A misunderstanding," I repeated flatly.

"I misunderstood how much she liked you," she said, adding under her breath, "and how angry she still was with me."  There was a hint of something in her voice, something I didn't recognize but which didn't seem to go with the sudden bright smile she gave me.  "You should probably check on Natalie; we're almost at Atlanta."

I nodded uncertainly and had gotten as far as unbuckling my seat belt when Natalie came back in.  She hesitated when she saw me and Jocelyn staring at her, but moved to her seat without saying anything. 

Completely at a loss for anything to say myself, I decided to take a risk: I rested my hand, palm up, on the armrest between us.  After a fraught moment, Natalie put her hand in mine and laced our fingers together.

My breath caught and I turned my head to hide my face and the conflicting emotions I was sure were written all over my features.

~~~

"So, who's my patient?" 

Tiffani, Jocelyn's EMT friend, was looking at us expectantly.  She was very blonde and very perky.  "Come on, come on, we don't have all day.  The stabilizing excuse only holds for so long."

Jocelyn and Natalie both looked at me.  I sighed, too emotionally drained to put up a fuss.  "What do I need to do?"

Tiffani considered me for a moment, presumably coming to the conclusion that a stretcher would be a bad idea.  "How about we look like we're helping you down the stairs?" she suggested.  "We can say you hit your head during a patch of turbulence."

"I'll help," Natalie instantly volunteered.  I felt my cheeks heat up and I looked down to study the floor.

"Perfect," Jocelyn decreed, sounding impatient, and soon we were all moving down the stairs in a huddle, Natalie in front of me, holding my hands as if steadying me, and Tiffani behind, hands under my elbows.  With that much unnecessary help it was actually rather difficult to keep from falling over my own feet, but we managed it all without mishap and piled into the ambulance.

"Almost there," Tiffani declared as she slid into the driver's seat.  "We'll go to the station and switch to my car, and then I can take you two anywhere you want to go."

"Us two," I repeated uncertainly from the bench in the back of the van.

"Tiffani and I have some catching up to do," Jocelyn said from up front in the passenger seat.  "I've arranged a suite for the two of you for tonight; tomorrow we'll head to the FBI."

I felt my mouth hanging open and closed it with a snap.  Turning to Natalie who was sitting next to me with her eyes closed, I asked, "Is it just me, or does this feel like a setup?"

Her lips were twitching.  "It's not just you," she said, not sounding bothered in the least by the prospect.

My eyebrows bunched up and I scowled down at the gurney bumping up against my knees. Why had Jocelyn been hitting on Natalie earlier if she was setting us up now? 

Speaking of setups – what was Natalie expecting of me tonight?  If this was a movie, we'd probably have already had sex by now.  Twice.  Of course, if this was a movie I wouldn't currently be so self-consciously aware of the stretch marks on my stomach or the fact that I needed to shave pretty much everywhere.  If this was a movie, I'd probably be excited by the prospect of sharing a bed with Natalie, rather than terrified.

_She's not going to make you do anything you don't want to do_ , I reminded myself.  _If she tries, you'll kick her ass._

I glanced over at Natalie's bright green eyes, her wind-tousled dirty blonde hair, her lean body, her perfect tan.  Then I looked down at my protruding stomach, my odd tan lines, and my hairy legs.  I sighed.  Why was I worrying?  Nothing was going to happen.

~~~

The transfer from the ambulance to the car went smoothly and soon we were driving through the narrow, winding streets of Atlanta.  I kept my head turned towards the window, absently picking out the few landmarks I remembered from the time I lived here and making note of any MARTA stations I saw.  Worst came to worst, Paul only lived a half a mile from a rail stop.

"Here we are," Jocelyn announced as the car pulled to a stop.  I was ninety percent sure we were in a place I'd never been before, but then, aside from Piedmont Park, the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, and the DeKalb Farmers' Market, I hadn't seen much of Atlanta.  I'd only been there six months and, thanks to a miserable job at a poorly run private school, they weren't the best six months of my life.  Still, we were within a few blocks of a MARTA station, which made me feel a little less lost.

The building we stopped at didn't look anything like a hotel from the outside: it was only three stories tall and was surrounded by old growth oaks with trunks so large that Natalie and I together couldn't wrap our arms around one of them.  Between the low-hanging Spanish moss, the azalea bushes bursting with flowers, and the grand white pillars that rose the entire height of the building, it looked like nothing so much as an old Southern plantation.

Inside was gorgeous.  Everywhere I looked I saw marble and old mahogany, edged with gold leaf and velvet and projecting Old World elegance and charm.  It took everything I had not to gawk about me like a rube, while Jocelyn and Natalie strode through the lobby as if they owned the place.  Jocelyn's ease was understandable: her stylish clothes and stunning looks would fit even the most upscale of establishments.  I was a bit more surprised at Natalie; her shabby, comfortable clothes and messy, unwashed hair should have made her stand out even more obviously than myself with my neatly braided hair and fresh clothes, but her open assurance and self-confidence made it obvious that she was at home in this palace of wealth and luxury.  I wondered just how much money information brokers made.

The concierge was clearly well-trained, because she didn't bat an eye at Natalie's scruffiness or my own blatant nervousness and in minutes we were heading up the elevator to the second floor, a bellhop in tow despite the fact that the sum total of our luggage consisted of my small rolling suitcase and a gym bag for Natalie.

The suite was enormous.  Jocelyn and Natalie seemed to take it in stride, with Jocelyn inspecting the bedroom and Natalie tipping the bellhop, but I found myself gawking again as I took in the large bay window, the flat screen television, the matching sofas, the _piano_ – why was there a piano? – and considered the fact that this suite probably cost more per night than my apartment cost per month.

I was still staring at everything when Jocelyn said, "Everything looks okay.  If you need anything just charge it to the room.  I'll be back tomorrow at eight to pick you up."

"Thanks, Jos," Natalie said, kissing her on the cheek.  

_Apparently she's not that mad at her after all,_ I thought grumpily, though I tried to sound nicer when I thanked her, adding, "Have fun with Tiffani."

"I will," Jocelyn said knowingly.  She gave Natalie a kiss and me a wave on her way out.

Leaving me alone with Natalie. 

Before uncomfortable silence could set in, Natalie said, "I'm ordering room service.  You want anything?"

Between us we managed to order most of the menu.  Natalie hung up the phone and announced, "I'm going to take a shower."

I wondered if maybe I wasn't the only one nervous about potentially awkward silences, but just nodded.  A moment later I heard Natalie growl from the bedroom, " _Jocelyn_."

Curious, I joined her.  The first thing I saw on entering the room was the massive king-size bed.  The _solitary_ king-size bed. 

"Sometimes Jocelyn isn't very subtle," Natalie commented as we stared at the bed.

Remembering what Jocelyn said to me on the plane, I couldn't disagree.

We stared at the bed some more.  "I can sleep on the couch," Natalie offered.

I swallowed hard, feeling torn between disappointment and relief.  "Don't be ridiculous," I told her.  "You could sleep a family of eight on this bed."  I never did understand the belief that two people of compatible sexual genders couldn't sleep on the same bed without having sex.  Back in high school and college, I'd slept with Paul, more than once, and we'd never even touched.  Though, that said, I did have to admit that I was feeling a lot more anxiety and anticipation at the prospect of sleeping with Natalie than I ever had about sleeping with Paul.

It occurred to me that I was thinking about Paul a lot lately, more than I had since I was in high school, when Mom and Blythe kept commenting on how often I brought him up.  _My two great crushes,_ I thought to myself wryly.  A sad total for thirty years of life.

We survived dinner and our separate showers and by that point it was after eleven.  "This day has gone on forever," I groaned as I dropped onto my side of the bed.  It was a wonderful bed, soft, but still firm, and I hummed happily, even though I could already tell I was going to be too sore to walk in the morning.

"It's been rough," Natalie agreed, sitting down on the edge of the bed and leaning over me. 

I narrowed my eyes and inched back a bit.  "What're you doing?"

"Checking the cut on your forehead," she said absently, poking at my hairline.  The wound, which I'd almost managed to forget about, started throbbing.   "Ouch," I grumbled.  "Stop that."

She rolled her eyes, but stopped prodding.  "It's not infected, but I think it's going to scar."

I shrugged, too tired to care.  "Not the end of the world," I mumbled.  Then I groaned and forced my eyes open.  "What about your 'graze'?"

"It's fine," Natalie said, moving to get up.

I grabbed her thigh to hold her in place and gestured toward her sleeve with my free hand.  She sighed, but rolled up the sleeve to reveal a very neat bandage that looked nothing at all like the makeshift wound care I'd managed with strips of my suit jacket.  "Huh.  When did that happen?"

"Jocelyn did it," Natalie said, not meeting my eyes.  "On the plane."

_Imagine that_.  I bet she just couldn't manage to do it without sitting on Natalie’s lap, either.  "Didn’t it get wet in the shower?" I asked as neutrally as I could manage.

"I wrapped it in plastic."

I felt my eyebrows shoot up and the corner of Natalie's mouth quirked up in a grin.  "I hope you didn't need that complementary laundry bag."

Damn it, I liked those complimentary laundry bags.  I sighed and looked back at Natalie’s arm.  "Is it healing okay?"

"Well enough.  I'll have a scar, too.  What about your wrist?"

I turned up my hand for inspection.  As expected, my wrist was covered with a scab the size of which I hadn't seen since my childhood, but it was a surface wound.  "What about your bruise?" I asked, turning her face so I should see the right side.  The skin looked reddish and a little swollen, but not nearly as bad as I feared when I first saw her coming out of that house in the Keys with Bishop's men.

"Not a big deal," Natalie said, her voice sounding a little odd.

I let go of her face.  "Are you hurt anywhere else?" I asked suspiciously; Natalie never had told me what all Bishop had done to her.

"I'm fine," she said, which didn't answer the question.  I wondered if it was as annoying when I used that phrase on her.

"If you say so."

Natalie stared down at me.  After a few moments she cupped my cheek with her hand.  My breath caught and I held it as she gently ran her thumb over my cheekbone.  "You've been amazing the last couple of days," she said softly.

I gulped, unable to tear my eyes away from her.  "Thanks," I said breathlessly.

Her lips curved up into a gentle smile and she leaned forward slowly, giving me plenty of time to move away or stop her before her lips met mine.

My eyes closed as minty breath washed over my face and then she was kissing me.  Not a peck this time at all – her lips moved confidently over mine, deepening the kiss quickly.  I held myself still at first, not wanting to expose my inexperience by being too eager, but when she licked at my lower lip I opened my mouth and gave her entrance.

It should have been disgusting, having another person's tongue in my mouth, but it felt amazing as her tongue slowly stroked over mine before moving up to taste my palate.  I had an overwhelming urge to suck on the intruder; when I gave in Natalie groaned over me and pressed her lips even harder into mine.  I kissed back now, too caught up in the sensations to worry anymore about what she might think of me. 

Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to breathe and kiss at the same time and I finally had to pull back to gasp for air.  Natalie was gasping as well, I noted, and her eyes looked a little unfocused.  "Wow," she said.

"Wow?" I asked, my heart full to bursting.

"Wow," she confirmed, reinforcing the word with another quick kiss before flopping over me to land on her back in the middle of the bed.  "Unfortunately, we do need to get some sleep," she said, sounding quite satisfyingly regretful.

"We probably should," I said apologetically.  To be honest, as lovely as the kissing was, I was having a tough time keeping my eyes open.  It really had been one hell of a long day.  "We can pick this up again after we talk to the FBI," I offered, though my eyelids were already drooping.

Just before I drifted off I heard Natalie say, "Yeah, sure."  For some reason, her voice sounded sad.


	12. Chapter 12

"Heather.  Heather, you need to wake up."  Someone shook me.  "Heather?"

I groaned.  "Is it eight already?"

"No," Natalie whispered frantically.  "But you need to get up anyway.  Someone's coming."

"What?"  My eyes snapped open and I was sitting upright before I could quite figure out how it happened.  I choked back a whimper as my entire body registered complaints about movement of any sort.  Then I blinked; the room was still dark.  A quick glance at the clock showed that it was half-past midnight.  "Why are you even awake?"

"I couldn't sleep," Natalie said hurriedly.  "And it's a good thing, too -- I saw a van drive up just a minute ago and guys with guns came out.  We need to get out of here."

I shook my head, trying to wake myself up, but obediently rolled out of bed.  It was hard to see in the dim light, but I managed to find my suitcase by feel.  "How long do we have?" I whispered as I pulled out the first thing I found: a gauzy pair of dress slacks that looked a little bit like harem pants without the ankle cuffs.  Maybe not the most practical choice, but they were comfortable and easy to put on in the dark; I took them and the first bra I found.  My shirt from the day before was still lying next to the bed where Natalie had dropped it; I pulled it on and slipped my feet into the dreaded sandals before taking the time to find the twenty dollar bill I'd recovered from my car.  "Okay, I'm ready."

"Good," Natalie murmured from her spot next to the window.  "They're breaking into the lobby now; we have maybe five minutes to get clear."

My "how to escape a hotel room when bad guys are coming" scenario was very clear on what to do next: go out the window.  I joined Natalie in looking at the ground and winced.  Those azalea bushes were going to hurt.  "Any other way out besides the window?" I asked hopefully.

"No," Natalie said, sounding just as happy about those bushes as I felt.  "But we have another problem.  There's a guard down there."  She pointed to a slightly darker shadow than the ones surrounding it; as I watched, the shadow shifted and coalesced into a man with a really big gun.  "Any ideas?"

"On getting rid of the bad guy?  No.  But I know where to go once we get clear of here."

Natalie shot me a quick look.  "You sure?  We still don't know how they found this place."

"Oh, I have an idea," I said darkly and though I didn't say the name out loud, I know we were both thinking it.  _Jocelyn_.

"We'll talk about it later," Natalie said.  "Do you think you can get down without help?  I need you to create a diversion."

I glanced out the window again and winced.  Intellectually I knew that it was only about fifteen feet from the ledge of the window to the ground, but it looked a lot longer.  "Yeah," I sighed.  "How long do you need me to keep him distracted?"

"Just long enough for me to get out the window.  If you can get him to face the street, that would be best."

I grumbled, but didn't protest.  We both knew that the only way I'd manage to take the guy out on my own was with an extreme amount of luck.  The chances that this guy was another Bruno were minuscule.  "Don't take too long," I said as I slid off my shoes. 

"I won't," Natalie promised.  She started to lean forward, then glanced at the window and stopped.  Sounding frustrated, she whispered, "Be careful," then stepped back a little deeper into the room.

"Right," I whispered back, too busy trying to balance my terror versus the rapidly approaching gunmen to worry about that aborted lean.  Some of the terror was replaced by frustration as I wrestled with the old window before I finally got it unstuck and by that point I was in my calm headspace, with time slowing down as I chucked my shoes out the window.

Below, the darker shadow started inching forward from his hiding place.

Doing my best to ignore him, I slid out the window on my stomach and tried to carefully lower myself as far as possible before dropping to the ground.  As before, however, my mental scenario had not taken my weight into account, and the moment my feet were no longer balanced against the building, I fell into the bushes. 

Azalea bushes don't have thorns or rough bark, so you'd think they'd be a good plant to fall on.  They aren't.  My entire body felt like it'd just been turned into a pincushion and I desperately wanted to curl up and cry.

My life wasn't the only one at risk, however, so I fought my way through the branches to where the gunman was waiting for me.  "Stop," he said, and he probably planned on following that up with " – or I'll shoot", but he clearly wasn't expecting me to sprint right past him and run for the street.

A noise that sounded suspiciously like a muffled gunshot came from behind me and a chip suddenly flew up off the sidewalk.  I stumbled to a stop, my feet scraping harshly against the edge of the cement.

"Stupid bitch," the gunman said.  "Turn around."  I did and had to fight to keep my face from showing anything as the man hissed, "Now where is – "  An arm snaked around the man's neck and his eyes widened as his mouth opened and closed silently.  I stayed back for a moment, until I realized that staying still was likely to get me shot by the man's flailing and darted forward instead, gripping the man's wrist with both hands to keep the silenced gun pointed at the ground.

Sooner than I would have expected, the gunman's fighting slowed and then stilled altogether.  I gulped.  "Is he dead?" I asked, my voice so soft that even I could barely hear it.

"No," Natalie answered as she lowered the body to the ground, equally quiet.  "Find your shoes; we have to hurry."

I looked around, but after a trek through a swampy tropical island, my once-pale sandals were now a dark brown color and I couldn't find them in the shadows.  "We should leave them."

"You can't run on concrete in your bare feet," Natalie said.  She sniffed, then reached down and grabbed something from the ground.  "Found one."

I wrinkled my nose but took the offending object and between Natalie and me it didn't take but a few seconds longer to find the other.  As I was slipping them on I heard the sound of shattering wood coming from our window and Natalie and I sprinted for the street.  When Natalie would have turned left onto the asphalt, I grabbed her arm and dragged her right, too busy panting for breath to explain why.  My lungs already felt like they were burning; I couldn't even imagine how they were going to last me all the way to the rail station.

I must've sounded pretty awful, because we were only halfway there when Natalie grabbed my arm.  "We can slow down a bit," she said, not sounding the slightest bit winded.

I shot her a filthy look, and kept running.  I was going to make it to the damn station if it killed me.

"Where are we going?" Natalie asked, once it became clear that I wasn't slowing down.

I wanted to kill her for making me talk, but her curiosity was understandable.  "There's a MARTA station around the corner," I told her between gasps.  "We can take a train to my friend's house."

Natalie abruptly stopped.  "You have a friend in Atlanta?"

I stumbled to a stop and glared at her, pulling on her arm to get her going again.  "My best friend," I wheezed as we turned the corner.  The bright orange, yellow, and blue MARTA logo was possibly the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen before.

"And you didn't think to mention this before?" Natalie asked as we hurried up the stairs.  In the distance, I could hear the sound of a train coming and hurried even more: the trains stopped running at one a.m.

I was pulling out my twenty as we skidded to a halt in front of the Breeze machine, but Natalie grabbed my arm and pulled me along.  "No time," she said, heading for the turnstiles.  With a graceful jump, she leapt over on her first try.  My jump was not graceful and I didn't make it on the first try, but with Natalie's help I managed to get to the other side moderately unscathed. 

"You know we're going to have to do that again when we get off the train," I grumbled as we hustled down the stairs on the other side of the tracks, just as a train pulled up.  I checked twice to make sure it was a southbound train before dragging Natalie on board.  The car was empty and I fell gratefully into the nearest seat. 

Natalie crossed her arms and braced herself on the pole nearest my seat.  "Best friend?"

I leaned back in my seat with a sigh.  "Paul."

Natalie frowned slightly and sat down next to me.  "A guy?"

"A guy," I confirmed.  "We went to high school together."  I wrapped my arms around myself; the car was cool and my shirt was thin.

Natalie draped an arm over my shoulders and I leaned gratefully into her.  "Why didn't you mention him before?"

"I didn't want to get him involved," I admitted.  A foreboding thought struck me.  "They won't be able to connect me to him, will they?"

Natalie considered that for a moment.  "Was he in the address book on your phone?"

"Yes."  Not to mention the fact that he, Mom, and Blythe were the only people who would be on my call log.  "But I lost my phone when the bomb went off.  Honestly, it probably didn't even survive the explosion.  If it did, I have dozens of names in my address book."  Off Natalie's poorly hidden look of surprise, I muttered, "I have a lot of cousins."  When Natalie didn't say anything, I asked nervously, "Did I screw up here?  Am I putting Paul and Nicole in danger by being in Atlanta?"

"Nicole?" Natalie asked sharply.  "Who's Nicole?"

I frowned at her, surprised at her vehemence.  "Paul's wife."

"Paul is married?"

"Yeah," I said, cautiously.  "Is that a problem?"

All of a sudden, Natalie relaxed.  "No, of course not."  She hesitated.  "Though there is a chance that Cabrillo will be able to get your phone records."

I swore.  It wasn't that I called Paul that often, maybe once a month on average, but still, if Cabrillo recognized that it was an Atlanta number ...  "I'm an idiot," I muttered.  My only hope at this point was the fact that Atlanta had something like ten area codes; maybe I'd get lucky and Cabrillo wouldn't know them all.

"It's okay," Natalie said softly.  "It's not like you've been in this situation before."

In real life, no.  I'd had plenty of hostage scenarios in my mind, however, and in every one of them I behaved smarter and more rationally than I was doing now.  "At least Jocelyn doesn't know about Paul," I said with a sigh.

Natalie stiffened.  "You really think Jocelyn gave us up to Cabrillo?"

"Do you have any other explanation for how they found us?" I shot back.  I shook off her arm and stood up to pace, suddenly feeling irritable.  A second later I sat back down again as the pain in my feet registered.

Natalie sighed and rubbed her face.  "I don't know," she admitted.  "But if Jocelyn said she was going to help us, I can't believe that she'd just turn around and betray us."

I looked at her closely.  "And by 'us' you mean you."

She shrugged and looked away.

"How long were you two together, anyway?" I asked, even though I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

Natalie suddenly found the need to study her boots.  "About eight years."

"Eight -- eight _years_?" I repeated numbly.

She shrugged.  "Off and on."

"Wow," I said, numbly.  "I don't think my dad even managed a marriage that lasted eight years."

Natalie smiled humorlessly.  "How many marriages has he had?"

"Four."

" _Four_?" she asked, sounding just as stunned as I had about "eight years".  I couldn't help but smile a little, and some of my tension bled away.

"My mom's been married three times," I offered.  "Though she's been married to Joe for twenty-five years, so I figure this one is probably going to stick."

"Holy shit," Natalie breathed.

"Yeah," I said wryly.

Now that my indignation had faded, I was getting chilly again.  Natalie held out her arm invitingly and after a hesitation I sighed and shifted over to sit next to her.  "What do we do if it is Jocelyn?" I asked quietly as her body heat seeped into me.  "She knows what we're planning to do."

"I don't know," she said, rubbing my arm and sounding a little lost.  "I just don't know."

~~~

We had to change trains at the Five Points station to get on the eastbound blue line, but that late at night there wasn't anyone around to notice us.  There wasn't anyone at the Decatur station either and after correcting a slight mishap where we ended up on the wrong side of the tracks, I managed to get us on Paul's street.  After all of my years living west of the Mississippi, I always found myself surprised anew at how narrow the streets of Atlanta were; Paul's street was so small that with cars parked on either side of the street, it basically became a one-lane road.

"Nice neighborhood," Natalie commented as we made our way down the street, trying not to trip over the sidewalk that had been warped and cracked over the years, thanks to the massive trees that filled many of the front lawns.

I glanced around at the small, neat houses, each one a distinctive style and all of them so different from the towering condos and cookie cutter subdivisions that made up much of Miami.  "It is pretty," I commented.  "Too many bugs, though."

Natalie just shook her head and chuckled.

Every time I drove to Paul and Nicole's house, I always managed to drive past it.  On foot, however, I was going slow enough to recognize their distinctive porch pillars, even at night.  "There it is," I murmured.  "Come on."

To Natalie's obvious confusion, I led her away from the front porch to the side of the house.  Hoping that I was remembering the windows properly, I went to the second to last window and reached up to tap on it. 

"He doesn't have a gun, does he?" Natalie asked nervously, hanging back near the side of the house, where she couldn't be seen from the window unless Paul stuck his head outside.

I choked down a laugh; clearly she hadn't seen the "War is not the answer" sign on the front lawn.  "He doesn't have a gun," I assured Natalie, and tapped on the window again.  This time I heard a thud inside the house and then the curtains were yanked open from the inside and Paul's face stared out.  I waved.

Paul's eyes widened comically and he slid the window up.  " _Heather?_ "

"Hi?"  I gave him a hopeful smile.

He closed his eyes for a moment and Nicole appeared next to him.  She looked really tired.  "Heather, is everything all right?"

"Not in the slightest," I admitted.

"Come around to the back door," Paul said with a sigh before turning and whispering something to Nicole.

I nodded and hurried through the back gate, unlocked as always, with Natalie close on my heels.  By the time I got to the door it was already open and lights were on in the kitchen.  Paul started talking as soon as I opened the screen door.  "Heather, what are y-- who is that?"

I laughed and it probably came out a little hysterical.  "This is Natalie, the woman who carjacked me."

"The woman who _what_?" Paul shouted and I hastily got between them before Paul's pacifism could be tested.

"It's okay," I said quickly.  "She's okay.  It's just ... it's a long story.  Didn't my mom call you?"

Paul subsided a little, but still looked deeply suspicious.  "Why would she have called me?"

I took a deep breath and attempted a smile.  "You might want to sit down.  This is going to take a while."

Paul stared at me narrowly for a moment before nodding and we all decamped to the living room.  I settled on the couch and Natalie promptly sat down next to me, a little closer than the length of the couch warranted.  Paul paused, then sat down in the opposite armchair, looking thoughtful.

"Is Nicole coming out?" I asked before I started, as I really didn't want to tell this story twice.

Paul, who had been staring intently at Natalie, shifted his eyes over to me.  "No, she went back to sleep.  Early morning client."

I nodded and murmured to Natalie, "She's a counselor."

Natalie nodded and shifted a bit closer, draping an arm over my shoulders, and it finally, _finally_ dawned on me what was going on.  I turned to give Natalie an incredulous look.  "Are you _jealous_?" I hissed, hopefully soft enough that Paul couldn't hear me.

Natalie's ears turned pink.  "No."

I shook my head and huffed, secretly pleased and a little relieved to know I wasn't the only one who was feeling possessive.  "If you say so," I said, but I leaned into her side anyway as her arm squeezed me just a little.

Paul had watched this whole byplay with raised eyebrows and an amused quirk of his lips.  "Carjacker, huh?"

"It's a long story," I said again.  "Starting with that car bomb that went off in Miami three days ago."

Paul bolted upright.  "The _what_?"

I told him the whole story: the car bomb, the ride in the trunk -- he shot Natalie a nasty glare at that -- Bishop, Bruno, Blade, Jocelyn, the expensive hotel.  The only things I left out were the contents of the flash drive and what had happened between me and Natalie a few hours before.  The flash drive Paul would hopefully never know about and as for the other ... well, that was going to have to wait till Natalie wasn't sitting right next to me, listening to every word.

Aside from a few exclamations of disbelief and worry, Paul listened to the story without interrupting.  When I finished, he rubbed his eyes, which were ringed with dark circles, and sighed.  "You know, this sounds like an action movie."

"That's just what I've been thinking," I said wryly. "It'd be really exciting if it wasn't happening to me."

Paul tried to smile but his face quickly turned serious.  "Are Nicole and I in danger?"

"I don't think so," I told him honestly.  "I hope not.  I don't have anything personal at my apartment, so it depends on if they're able to get my phone records.  Even if they do, we should be out of here in just a few hours.  If it's okay with you, of course."

"Nicole and I talked about it before I let you in," Paul said.  "It's fine for tonight.  We only have the pull-out, though, unless one of you wants to take the couch out here."

"The pull-out's fine," Natalie said.  It was the first thing she'd said since I started the story.

I rolled my eyes at her.  "We'll be fine," I told Paul.  "Are the sheets where they usually are?"

He nodded.  "I'll get some pillows."

Between the two of us, we made short work of converting the office couch into a bed and getting it made up.  Natalie watched for a bit before going into the bathroom; the moment she was gone, Paul leaned in and whispered to me, "Heather, you know I trust your judgment."

"I do," I said warily.

"Good.  That said: do you know what you're doing?"

"Absolutely not," I muttered back, tucking the sheet into the corner.  "But she seems to like me, God knows why."

Paul frowned.  "I hate it when you put yourself down like that."

"Ha.  Tell me you aren't thinking that she's way out of my league."

"I think she likes you," Paul said firmly.  "If you like her back, that's all that matters."  He paused.  "As long as she doesn't get you killed."

I opened my mouth to say something, something that might've contained the words "witness protection", when the toilet flushed.  I scowled down at the bed, focusing very hard on getting the sheets perfectly straight and a minute later Natalie walked in.  "Everything all right?" she asked, breaking the tense silence.

"Fine," I said brightly, then winced as Natalie frowned at me.  "Sorry.  We're all just tired."

Paul watched the exchange closely and I had a sinking feeling I was finally going to find out what it was like to have a brother.  All he said, however, was, "I'll wake you up at seven?"

"Thanks," I said, grateful; I wasn't at all sure I would've been able to wake up on my own.

"Thanks, man," Natalie said, and she held her hand out.  Paul eyed it for a moment before shaking it and I couldn't be sure but I had the impression that they were both making an effort _not_ to squeeze too hard.

I shook my head and turned away to crawl into the bed, all of my clothes still on.  They were comfortable enough and, besides, if we had to escape in the middle of the night again, this time I would be prepared.  I just hoped it didn't come to that – Paul would forgive me eventually, but I'd never forgive myself.

Natalie shut the door behind Paul and turned off the lights before she sat down to wrestle with her boots.  I laughed a little under my breath.  "Have you considered getting shoes that don't take twenty minutes to take off?"

"I like these boots," Natalie said defensively, just as she managed to tug one of them off with a grunt.  She was wrestling with the other one when she said, almost sounding casual, "So that's your best friend?"

I lifted my eyebrows and flipped over so I could see her, though all I could see at the moment was her back.  "Yes."

She tugged and shoved and finally got her second boot off and spent quite a bit of time getting them perfectly aligned on the floor.  "Did you guys ever date?" she finally asked.  She didn't turn around to face me.

I chuckled, feeling comfortable with that question in a way that I never had before.  "No.  I’m not into guys."

Natalie's shoulders relaxed a hair and she finally slid into bed.  "Really?  But you've been friends all these years.  Close enough friends that he’ll put you up in the middle of the night, even though you have a homicidal madman chasing you."

I rolled my eyes.  "Yes, Paul is awesome.  But, even if I were straight, I’m not Paul’s type.  He likes small women.  You probably couldn't tell from the window, but Nicole's nearly a foot shorter than he is."

Natalie reached up and brushed my cheek.  "But the way you look at him – tell me you didn’t have a crush on him at one point.”

I felt myself flush, but honesty compelled me to admit, "I was a little confused in high school.  Not that it mattered.  We wouldn't have worked together.  Too different, and not in a compatible way."

"I'm happy to hear it," Natalie said.  Cupping the back of my neck, she pulled me down for a kiss.  Feeling warm and happier than I'd been in a long time, I went along eagerly.


	13. Chapter 13

Paul woke us up the next morning, as promised, and I have to confess that after less than four hours of sleep for the whole night, Natalie and I weren't particularly gracious.  Paul put up with it because he's awesome that way.

Nicole was already gone by the time I got out of the shower, so it was just Paul and Natalie in the kitchen.  They were staring at each other rather intently when I first came in, but the moment I made a noise they suddenly stopped and greeted me warmly.  I just shook my head at both of them and started heating up a skillet for breakfast while Paul took a shower of his own.

"Are those chickens?" Natalie asked as I was cracking eggs into the pan, and I turned to find her staring out into the backyard. 

"Probably," I said as I turned back to fish out a piece of eggshell.  "Paul and Nicole raise them."

"In the middle of Atlanta?"

"Mm-hm.  They teach classes on it, actually."

Natalie glanced over at the eggs currently sizzling in the pan.  "Are those – "

"Yep," I said, hiding a smile at her furrowed brow.  I decided not to mention that there were at least three other people in the neighborhood doing the same thing, not to mention the couple raising goats a few blocks over.

It was the last moment of levity I felt for a long while, as the cab came up just as we were finishing breakfast.  "Be safe," Paul said as I hugged him goodbye.  "Call if you need anything."

"I will," I promised.  "Keep an eye out today, just in case."

"Will do."

~~~

The ride to the FBI offices somehow seemed to last forever and yet be over in no time at all.  Natalie and I were silent for the ride; I don't know what she was thinking about, but I was contemplating just how crappy my life was going to be when this was all over.  Probably unemployed, no savings, with a car that needed extensive work, and Natalie likely gone into witness protection ... as hard as I tried, I couldn't come up with a way to give it all a positive spin.

Thus it was with a heavy heart and leaden feet that I crawled out from the taxi at the US government office building.  It was a tall, modern building with black mirrored windows that perfectly matched my mood.

"Everything's going to be okay," Natalie whispered to me as she came around the taxi.  "I promise."

I grunted something that hopefully sounded like agreement and looked away while she was paying the driver. 

We'd asked the driver to take us into the single story garage that sat under the building; both Natalie and I were excruciatingly aware of the possibility of snipers sitting on one of the surrounding buildings and didn't want to risk being caught by a bullet.  That said, the garage was dark and dirty and I think I would've ultimately felt safer outside.

The taxi pulled away and Natalie came up next to me.  "Ready to do this?"

_No_.  "Sure," I said, unenthusiastically.  She took my hand and squeezed it, which helped a little, but not enough.

I was almost grateful to hear the sound of a gun cocking behind us; at least now I could see what the danger looked like. 

Natalie let go of my hand and we slowly turned around to see a heavily muscled guy with bright red hair pointing a gun at us.  He was standing next to a pillar; presumably that's where he'd been hiding while Natalie had been getting rid of the taxi.  I put up my hands.  Natalie didn't.

"Where's the dead box?" the gunman said, speaking to Natalie and not even looking at me.  I surreptitiously looked around the garage, trying to find something, anything, to use for defense.  A flash of movement in the shadows caught my eye and I snapped my head forward again, just in case that movement meant the bad guy had a partner.

"It's safe," Natalie told the bad guy while I was looking into the shadows.  I thought about what her army boot had been through the last couple of days and had to hold in a snort.

"Safe _where_?" the man said, sounding irritated.  Natalie just shrugged, looking remarkably cool about the whole situation.  She'd never been more attractive to me than she was at that moment.

Then the bad guy turned his gun on me.

My throat constricted and I let out a noise that might've been a whimper.  "Wait!" Natalie shouted.

The bad guy gave us a malicious grin.  "Tell me where the dead box is, or I shoot her."  He looked me over derisively.  "Maybe in that fat stomach of hers.  Take her a long while to die."

I swallowed hard, torn between terror and fury.  Natalie looked at me helplessly; she had to know as well as I did that the moment she gave up that flash drive, we were both dead anyway.  "Don't tell him," I forced out, though my lips were numb and it didn't feel like I had enough air to breathe, much less talk.  "Don't."

Natalie opened her mouth, but I never found out what she was going to say because at that moment Jocelyn slid out from behind a pillar and shoved a taser into the bad guy's neck.

The gunman twitched a few times and for a second I thought I was going to get shot anyway by his trigger finger squeezing reflexively.  Then, all of a sudden, he slid down to the floor in a boneless lump.

As one, Natalie and I turned to stare at Jocelyn.  "Thank God," she said, and even I had to admit that she sounded sincere.  "When the hotel called me about the room, I thought you'd been taken."

"What about the room?" Natalie asked warily.

"It was demolished," Jocelyn said frankly.  "The door was broken in and everything in it was destroyed."

Natalie and I exchanged a look; apparently my suitcase was another casualty of this whole mess.

"Where were you, anyway?" Jocelyn asked.  "Tiffani and I searched everywhere around the hotel."

I pressed my lips and glowered at Natalie.  She explained how we jumped out of the window and escaped but, to my relief, she didn't say anything about Paul.

Jocelyn eyed us both closely, clearly aware that we were hiding something.  Before she could push further, the man at her feet groaned.  Jocelyn glanced down and kicked him in the head.  The man went still.

I winced and next to me Natalie's lips were so tightly pressed together that they were nearly white.  Ignoring both of our reactions, Jocelyn said, "Come on," and started for the elevators.

I glanced at Natalie and felt a little thrill of dark satisfaction when she didn't move to follow.

Jocelyn took a few steps before she noticed that she was alone.  Turning back, she lifted one perfectly plucked eyebrow.  "Well?"

Natalie crossed her arms.  "How did Cabrillo's men know where to find us?"

In my mind I started cheering wildly, and I couldn't quite control a victorious smirk though I did keep my head down, hoping it would be lost in the shadows.

To my surprise, Jocelyn didn't pretend that she didn't know exactly what Natalie was implying.  For a moment she didn't answer at all, just looked thoughtfully at us both, and when she finally did speak, it wasn't at all what I expected.  "Yesterday I called Andre and told him I was coming."

I gaped at her.  It was one thing for her to betray us, but to be so open about it was something else entirely. 

Natalie handled it better; while I was still recovering, she asked tightly, "Why?"

Not looking at all intimidated by Natalie's low, dangerous-sounding voice, Jocelyn answered, "Because there was no way I could fly into Atlanta without Andre finding out.  By contacting him first, I showed him respect and was able to get him to agree to keep from reporting my presence in the city."

"Clearly he _lied_ ," I retorted.

"Actually, Andre is dead," Jocelyn returned flatly.  "Shot in his home last night."

That shut me up.  Natalie looked equally surprised.  "Cabrillo?"

"It looks like it," Jocelyn said grimly.

Natalie swore.

"What?" I asked warily.  "Why is that such bad news?"

"Because criminal organizations aren't like what you see in movies," Natalie said.  "A crime lord who regularly kills his employees would very shortly find himself without anyone willing to work for him."

"Not to mention the fact that Andre was a brilliant manager," Jocelyn added, "which is a lot more rare in the criminal world than you might expect.  Why risk imprisonment and/or death every day for a few hundred thousand dollars per year when you can do the same job in a legitimate business and get millions?"

"But if he was betraying Cabrillo … " I started.

"Then you cut off his finger," Jocelyn said bluntly.  "That gets the point across without destroying a valuable resource."

I couldn't think of any answer to that and kept silent as Natalie asked, "Do you really think he'd go this nuts over a single DEA agent?"

"I don't know," Jocelyn said.  "I wouldn't have thought so, but Cabrillo isn't always rational.  Either way, there's not much we can do now except go upstairs before this jackass wakes up or more of Cabrillo's people show up."

Even I couldn't argue the truth of that statement and so we silently made our way to the elevators.

When we exited through the first floor, we were faced with a metal detector and an X-ray machine that looked decidedly out of place in the otherwise exquisite lobby of black granite and enormous windows.  Jocelyn discreetly discarded her taser in the nearest trash can.

After the security checkpoint, we went to the front desk; it was positioned so that you couldn't go to the elevators without checking in.  I was a little worried that this was where we'd finally trip up, but Jocelyn just stepped up to the desk and told the guard to inform the FBI that "Jocelyn Dupree and Natalie Medina" were waiting in the lobby.

The guard looked at me.  I gave a little wave, but didn't bother giving him my name.  Looking deeply dubious, the guard picked up the phone and made the call.  He was clearly surprised by whatever response he got, because he shot a quick look at Jocelyn and when he hung up he sounded a bit stunned as he gave us visitors' passes and told us that someone would be right down.

Feeling a bit surprised myself, I followed Natalie and Jocelyn to a waiting area near the elevators.  "So, your last name is Medina?"

"Yep," Natalie answered.  "Unlike Jos, I like the name I was born with."

Which of course made me desperately curious as to what Jocelyn's real name was, especially after she shot Natalie a pointed glare.  Before I worked up the nerve to ask, however, the elevators dinged and a prim, tight-lipped woman with a brown bun came out to meet us.  She didn't introduce herself and she didn't shake our hands, but she did escort us up to the elevators.  As I stayed in the corner and attempted to make myself invisible, I wondered if the woman was some sort of super-agent with secret skills that made her the ideal person to be alone with criminals on an elevator.  Or maybe she was just the secretary doing grunt work, but I thought my idea was more interesting.

I have to admit, when I envisioned the FBI's offices, I imagined something a little more ... well, interesting.  The elevator opened up on a bland, impersonal waiting room with grey industrial carpeting and a receptionist desk that looked like it was made from spare cubicle walls.  Our escort made her way around the counter to the receptionist desk and sat at the computer.  A moment later she was typing away and still ignoring us completely.

Natalie and Jocelyn seemed content to just stand around and wait, so I stood there with them, feeling awkward.  They proved to be in the right, however, as just a couple minutes after we arrived two people stepped out from behind the receptionist's desk.  The taller of the two was male, about six foot tall, with brown eyes and hair, dashing good looks, and a cheerful smile, which he focused on me.  I immediately liked him.  The smaller of the two was a positively tiny woman, no more than five one or two, with curly brown hair, bright blue eyes, and an abundance of freckles that would have looked adorable with a smile.  She wasn't smiling, now.  "Jocelyn Dupree?" she asked, sounding a little disbelieving.

Jocelyn smiled at her and held out her hand.  "In the flesh," she said as she shook the agent's hand, holding on a few seconds longer than necessary.  The agent flushed slightly.  I could sympathize.

"Agent Hauser," the male agent said suddenly, holding out his own hand.  Jocelyn's smile grew several degrees cooler as she gave him a shake.

"I'm Agent Harris," the woman said, briskly taking Natalie's hand.  "You must be Natalie Medina."

"I am," she confirmed.  Their handshake was businesslike.

Introductions complete, everyone turned to look at me.  I had to fight the urge to shrink back as I offered, "Heather George.  Innocent bystander."  Unfortunately, it came out as less of a statement and more of a question and I was grateful when Natalie reached out to give my hand a quick squeeze.  To my disappointment, however, she immediately let it go again.

Agents Harris and Hauser watched this all in silence and exchanged a glance before turning back to Jocelyn.  "So," Harris said casually, "I'm assuming you're here to talk about Alexis Vargas?"

I furrowed my brow and looked over at Natalie.  _Alexis Vargas?_ I mouthed.  She just shook her head at me.

Jocelyn shook her head sadly.  "I don't know why everyone thinks I had something to do with Ms. Vargas's disappearance.  I don't kidnap people."  She cleared her throat, and added pointedly, "However, you might consider that maybe there was a reason why Ms. Vargas chose to run away four times before she finally disappeared.  Some might consider that to mean that she's safer and better off in her new home, wherever that might be."

Hauser snorted and Harris looked like she'd just bitten into a lemon.  Doing a remarkable job of keeping her cool, however, she just asked, "Then why are you here?"

"As escort," Jocelyn said brightly.  "Natalie?"

Natalie stepped forward and explained to them about the dead box business, about how many times Cabrillo had tried to kill us, about her suspicions that a high-level DEA agent was involved, and about the fact that she and Jocelyn had apparently skimmed through quite a few of the files back on the airplane while I was in the bathroom.

"You what?" I asked, shooting Natalie an offended look.

"It was for your own safety," Jocelyn said when Natalie didn't speak up to defend herself.  "As long as you don't know any details in those documents, Cabrillo has no reason to go after you."

"Not that it's stopped him so far," I muttered, but I saw her point.  So far, Cabrillo had gone after _Natalie_.  The only reason why I was involved was because Cabrillo thought I was with Natalie.  Should that circumstance change -- for example, if Natalie should go into witness protection -- then I would, theoretically, be in the clear. To be honest, I wasn't sure how much confidence I had in that argument, but I could see the logic in not getting me any deeper into this mess than I already was.

That said, just because I could see the logic didn't mean that I had to like it, which was why when Natalie suggested that she and Jocelyn go off somewhere else with the agents while I stayed in the waiting room, I pitched a fit.  A quiet fit with a lot more hissing than shouting, but a fit nonetheless.  The end result was that I didn't have to stay in the waiting room.  Unfortunately, I wasn't going to be allowed in the meeting either, which was how I ended up in an interrogation room, albeit one without a one-way mirror.  Apparently that meant that it was an interrogation room for witnesses rather than suspects.  Personally, I found the tiny room with its inevitable grey industrial carpeting and neutral grey walls to be plenty discomfiting, even without the mirror.

So I waited.  At first it wasn't too bad, as I started going through the squares of numbers one through twenty-five: 1, 4, 9, 16 ...  I had most of them memorized since high school and it didn't take long.

Then I went through the powers of two that I had memorized, up to 215.

Then I tried to do state capitals.  I only managed seven before I remembered that I sucked at state capitals and switched over to just listing all of the states.  Alphabetically.

By the time I was going through the atomic elements by letter, I was starting to get a bit annoyed, especially when I couldn't remember if dysprosium was actually an element or if my subconscious was making it up because I couldn't stand to have no elements for the letter D.  I was seriously contemplating testing the door to see if it was locked when the handle suddenly turned and Agent Hauser poked his head into the room.  "Doing okay in here?" he asked with a bright smile.

Feeling a little dazzled by the brightness of that smile, it took me a second to remember that I was annoyed.  "Honestly, I'm getting a bit stir-crazy.  Isn't there anywhere else I can sit?"

"Speak of the devil," he said, holding the door open for me.  "I was just coming to get you.  I'm supposed to bring you upstairs to talk about what happens to you next."

Well.  That sounded ominous.  Still, more information was better than no information, so I climbed to my feet and slipped out the door past him.  _At least I'll probably get to see Natalie soon_ , I reasoned as I followed Agent Hauser down a deserted hallway, though the thrill I felt at the thought was dampened by my increasing certainty that once this debacle was over, I'd never see Natalie again.

For a moment, I allowed myself to imagine going into protection with her.  To start my life over again, like I'd already done several times before, only this time I'd have a new name and a past of my own choosing and someone by my side to help me through all of those painful social moments that I found so terrifying.  Maybe this time when I talked to Mom I could tell her about all of the wonderful people I'd met and she'd be proud that I'd finally developed into a social butterfly.

Only I wouldn't be able to talk to my mom, would I?  Nor could I talk to Blythe or Paul or anyone else from my old life.  Hell, I didn't know how witness protection actually worked in real life; maybe I wouldn't even be able to tell them why I was disappearing.

I'd known Natalie for three days.  Was that really enough to give up the fifteen years I'd known Paul, or the entire lifetime I'd shared with Mom and Blythe?

I was still fighting with myself over the possibilities when Agent Hauser stopped by an elevator, an elevator that was manifestly not in the waiting room.  I looked around the area, taking in storage supplies and a few abandoned cubicles, and frowned.  "Where is everyone?"

"I'm taking you up the back elevator," he said easily.  "Less busy, and it's closer to our destination upstairs."

The explanation sounded very reasonable, but I still felt a niggling of suspicion as we stepped into the elevator and rode it up in silence.  I knew I'd been right when the doors opened to reveal not offices, but construction.  "I am such an idiot," I muttered.

"What was that?"

I turned to find Hauser pointing a gun at me, of course.  I sighed.  "Nothing.  Just thinking about someone who recently told me that I was paranoid."

"Not paranoid enough, apparently.  Out you go."

I sighed again and stepped out of the elevator, wondering what I could possibly do to get myself out of this mess.  On the one hand, Hauser didn't really seem that inclined to kill me.  On the other hand, I had a suspicion that the reason he wasn't going to kill me right away was because he was planning on torturing me first, which was one of those things that sounded bearable in theory, but which I seriously doubted I'd actually be able to withstand in real life.

You might be wondering why I was being so calm about this situation.  The truth of the matter was, I wasn't calm at all.  My heart was pounding, my palms were sweating, and my bladder was making a firm argument for pissing myself.  Fortunately, I'd gotten a lot of practice at thinking while terrified over the previous few days.

Only problem was, the thinking wasn't doing me a damn bit of good.  Unlike my other adventures, I was all alone and I didn't think Hauser was nearly as stupid as Bruno had been.  However I got out of this mess, I wouldn't be able to count on luck.

Unfortunately, luck seemed to be the only thing I had to work with.  Hauser was bigger, better trained, and armed.  My only allies, Natalie and Jocelyn, were several floors away and quite possibly fighting for their own lives if Agent Harris was as corrupt as her partner seemed to be.

As for my surroundings, on the surface they seemed promising.  All around us were bare beams that would probably be very effective clubs if they weren't bolted to the floor and ceiling.  Tarps were draped everywhere, if I somehow managed to develop the strength and cold-bloodedness necessary to asphyxiate Hauser.  Exposed electrical wires would be useful if there was any power, though the fact that the wires were exposed seemed to imply that there wasn't.  There in the corner was a buzz saw, if I could get to it, figure out how to turn it on, and use it on Hauser, all before he managed to shoot me.

Oh God.  I was so very, very fucked.

"You're being awfully quiet," Hauser commented as he walked me through the empty floor.

"Would it do me any good to scream?" I asked.  I was fully prepared to do so if it might help.

"Nope," Hauser said, easily enough that it was probably true.  "The insulation's too thick."

"There you have it, then."  I regretted the comment a moment later as it occurred to me that rather than getting Hauser to underestimate me, he was probably overestimating me.  The fact was that I was completely out of ideas and fighting a losing battle against an exhausted but still hard-working adrenal gland.  "What do you want with me, anyway?" I asked, a little desperately.  "I don't know anything."

"People tell me that quite often," Hauser said.  "Invariably they turn out to know more than they thought they did."

That sounded very bad.

I estimated that we were near the middle of the floor when Hauser told me to stop walking.  Looking around, I couldn't see how this one spot was different than any others, though he did have me stop next to one of the exposed metal beams.  Keeping his gun on me, Hauser pulled out his handcuffs.  "Put these on," he said, tossing them to me.

I only had a split second to think.  Torture, probably followed by painful death.

Fuck that.

Deliberately fumbling the cuffs, I let them fall to the ground.  "Sorry, sorry," I said quickly.

Hauser rolled his eyes.  "Come on, come on, I don't have all day."

I nodded at him and, rather than bend over, I crouched down, reaching over as if I was picking up the cuffs.  At the last minute, however, I launched myself forward, swinging up hard with my fist into Hauser's groin.

I will say this for myself: I definitely caught Hauser by surprise.  Unfortunately, that wasn't nearly enough.

The blow connected with the front of Hauser's crotch, hitting his penis rather than his testicles, though the punch connected better than I'd thought and I was hopeful that his gonads hadn't escaped completely unscathed.  At the same time, he fired his gun at me, and while my forward dive kept my head under the path of the bullet, the rest of my body wasn't so lucky and I felt a burning slice being taken out of my back.

Forget what the movies tell you about how it feels to be shot.  It's not a little blow.  You don't bounce back up from it.  It's scalding agony and it'd bring down Rambo in real life.

We both fell to the ground, writhing in pain.  "I'm going to kill you, bitch," Hauser gritted out.  Frankly, with the excruciating pain in my back, I didn't think I'd put much effort into stopping him.

Then I had an epiphany, lying there on the floor in a puddle of my own blood.  In point of fact, I _would_ put effort into stopping Hauser.  If he pointed his gun at me again, I'd do my best to kick him in the nads before he could get off a shot, even if it did hurt like hell.  While I may still have been borderline suicidal at times, there was _no way_ I was going to let a little prick like Hauser be the one to kill me.

Dragging my righteous anger around me, I managed to get myself to my feet, mainly by using my good arm to haul myself up the beam that Hauser had probably intended to handcuff me to in preparation for torture.  Torture that probably wouldn't hurt nearly as much as my goddamn back did at that moment, but that wasn't a productive line of thinking and I shoved it aside.

Still, I took a little more pleasure than I should out of kicking Hauser in the nuts.  Twice.  I would've gone for the trifecta if a wave of nausea hadn't chosen that moment to roll over me and for a second all I could do was cling onto that beam for dear life as my legs tried to crumple.  I might've stayed there indefinitely, if I hadn't heard something over the sound of Hauser whimpering.  A sound that should've been comforting, but which instead filled me with dread.

The quiet dinging sound of an elevator reaching its destination.

Suddenly I found myself completely unable to think of anything else aside from tiny little Agent Harris, who had been so ready to leave me behind in an interrogation room while she questioned Natalie and Jocelyn.  Who was Hauser's partner on the job and most likely his partner in corruption as well.  Who was undoubtedly heading for me right at that very moment, semi-automatic in hand.

I ran.

Well, to be completely accurate, I shuffled, and while I did manage to do so at a speed that belied my awkward gait, the trail of bloody spatter I left behind eliminated any advantage that speed might have provided.  Looking around me desperately, I snatched a tarp off of a wall and wrapped it around myself as quietly as I could.  Unfortunately, that still wasn't very quiet and a moment later I heard Agent Harris call out, "Cliff?  You here?"

It took me a second to figure out that Cliff was probably Agent Hauser.  I blamed the blood loss.

Absolutely determined to avoid meeting Cliff again at all costs and not terribly keen on bumping into Harris either, I slipped off my rapidly-approaching-toxic sandals and recommenced with the shuffling.  It wasn't easy to remain silent while doing so, but I found that moving slowly and consistently was the key and soon I found myself nearing the wall opposite the elevator.

At which point I again cursed myself for being an idiot.

The slow, miserable trip along the edges of the walls and back to the elevator seemed to take forever.  Every step brought a fresh wave of pain and every breath filled the already slimy interior of the tarp with an extra level of moisture.  Frankly, if it wasn't for the fact that Harris was _still_ calling out for Hauser, I might've given up entirely.  Her calls had a motivating effect on me, however; if Harris was still looking for Hauser, that meant she wasn't looking for me.

Finally, _finally_ I slipped around a last pile of lumber and found myself facing the elevator.  I let out an involuntary cry, because the space in front of the elevator wasn't empty: in fact, it was positively _teeming_ with people, all of whom were staying remarkably quiet, possibly to keep from interfering in Harris's search for Hauser.

Best of all, Natalie was in the group.

At the sound of my voice she looked up with an expression of utter relief on her face.  I took a step forward, only to see her expression change into one of horror.  "No!"

I stared at her and froze, just in time to feel an arm slide around my neck and a cold metal circle press firmly against the side of my head.

Hot, sour breath wafted over my cheek as Hauser leaned into my ear and said mockingly, "Gotcha."

Pandemonium broke loose.  Natalie lunged toward me and had to be restrained by Jocelyn and an agent I didn't recognize.  A half-dozen guns came snapping out of holsters and the part of my brain that hadn't frozen up in terror registered relief at evidence that there were at least some law enforcement officers who weren't corrupt.  Agent Harris came trotting around from behind a beam and pointed her gun at Hauser.  If only that hadn't meant she was pointing her gun at me, Hauser's human shield, everything would've been perfect.

"Cliff, why are you doing this?" Harris asked.  I closed my eyes and counted to ten and told myself that stupid questions were probably part of the whole hostage negotiation process.

Then again, Hauser sounded just as disgusted as I felt when he answered, "Why do you _think_ I'm doing this?"

I tuned out the inane conversation and let my eyes go where they wanted: to Natalie.  She was staring at me intently and the moment I looked her way, she started blinking rapidly.  If I had to guess, she was probably doing Morse code.  Unfortunately, I didn't actually know Morse code, so I had no idea what she was telling me to do.

Still, it was very clear that she was telling me to do _something_.  Glancing around at everyone's guns, which were still pointed in my direction, I had an idea.  It was one I'd had before, but it's something that can only be done once, and something that doesn't do much aside from making your hostage taker very pissed off, except in very, very special circumstances.  Like, say, a shoot-out where you're the human shield.

Turning my eyes to Natalie one last time, I imprinted her on my brain, just in case this was the last thing I'd ever see.

Then I played the last card I had left: I let myself go limp.

Being fat isn't something I'm particularly proud of or happy about, but there are a few rare moments when it serves a purpose.  For example: when a man is holding a woman about the neck, it's a lot harder to hold her up when she's not helping.  The heavier the woman is, the harder it is to hold her.

I'm a very heavy woman; Hauser dropped me almost immediately.

Time slowed as a gunshot rang out.

Over my shoulder I saw a red hole appear in the middle of Hauser's forehead.

Turning my head the other way, I saw Natalie standing in a shooter's stance, a gun held forward in both hands.  The agents around her turned, so slowly, to point their guns in her direction.

I crashed into the floor and excruciating pain radiated out from my back.  For a moment all I could see were bright stars.

When my vision cleared, time was back at normal speed.  Natalie was buried under a pile of federal agents, Jocelyn was standing there with her head in her hands, Harris was checking Hauser for a pulse, and my whole body was screaming at me that it'd had enough.

From under the pile of agents, Natalie lifted her head and offered me a rueful, relieved grin.  Digging deep, I managed a tremulous smile in return.  _Well_ , I thought, as a grey filminess encroached upon the edges of my vision and I felt the numbness in my lips and cheeks that heralded impending unconsciousness, _maybe there's something to be said for ruthlessness after all._


	14. Chapter 14

I woke up lying on my stomach, with my face smashed into a pillow that smelled vaguely of bleach and on sheets that were unpleasantly scratchy.  Not my sheets, then.  Good sheets were how I treated myself for birthdays and holidays.

All around me were soft beeping noises and I could hear the faint sound of an intercom in the distance.  Combined with the uncomfortable bed with plastic railings, I finally figured it out: hospital.

A cell phone rang next to me and, lacking the energy to move, I lay there and listened to the conversation.  "Hello?" a husky female voice said.

A pause, punctuated by a sigh that managed to sound both fond and irritated.  "Calm down, Lexie.  You've been ready for this for months now; I was just waiting for the right moment to hand the reins over for a trial run."

The response on the other side of the phone was so loud that even I could hear the frantic edge of the voice, though I couldn't make out the words.  "Stop it," Jocelyn said, sharply.  Of course it was her; who else would it be?  "You're the one that wanted to learn the business.  It's time to see what you've learned."

A pause.  Apparently Lexie said something right, because Jocelyn's voice was more gentle when she answered, "Don't forget, if you have any questions, I'm only a phone call away.  But I don't expect to hear from you.  You'll be fine."

The conversation ended without any professions of love but with obvious affection on Jocelyn's side, and I found myself wondering if Lexie was the person who'd replaced Natalie.  Though maybe "replaced" wasn't the right word, as I was fairly sure Jocelyn would take Natalie back in a heartbeat if she expressed any interest.

Finding the thought of Natalie and Jocelyn back together, even as part of a potentially open relationship, too depressing to bear, I shifted myself with the intention of pushing myself upright.  A dark hand with perfectly manicured nails pressed down on my arm.  "That's not a good idea."

I sighed and stopped moving, except for my head, which I twisted around until I could see Jocelyn sitting next to the bed.  "Where's Natalie?"

She rolled her eyes at me.  "In federal custody," she said, sounding annoyed.  "Where else would she be after shooting someone in front of eight federal agents?  Using a gun she stole off one of those agents, no less."

"Oh," I said, feeling obscurely let down, even as a wave of warmth washed over me at the memory of Natalie standing tall and strong, gun in hand.  "Can I see her?" I asked, a little plaintively.

"I'm sure that can be arranged, once you're out of the hospital."

Then I remembered: probably no job and, if no job, definitely no insurance.  I tried to get up again and when Jocelyn tried to hold me down, I fought.  "I can't afford to stay here," I snapped as I struggled.

"You don't have to worry about the money," Jocelyn retorted, pressing down firmly on the tops of my shoulders.  I got the distinct impression that she could've stopped me cold if she didn't have to work so hard to avoid my various injuries.  "When you get shot by a corrupt FBI agent _in an FBI office_ , the FBI foots the bill."

I stopped struggling.  "They'll pay for the hospital?"

"With a hefty settlement on the side, I'm sure," Jocelyn said.  She lifted her hands slowly, as if verifying that I was done fighting.  When I stayed still, she settled back into her chair.  "I'll have my lawyer contact you."

I considered the possibility of a settlement, but when I found myself wondering just how big that settlement might be I pushed the thought away.  No use in planning for a windfall that might not happen.  Instead, I considered my current condition, which I was fairly confident in classifying as "crappy".  "What'd the doctors say?"

"It's just a flesh wound," Jocelyn said brightly.  I narrowed my eyes at her and she laughed.  "Sorry, I've always wanted to say that.  It really isn't very serious, though.  You got lucky: it looks like the bullet slid down the flat side of your shoulder blade and then away from your body.  Thirty-five stitches, but no broken bones and no permanent damage."

"Except for one hell of a scar," I muttered.  Still, it was better than I thought.

Jocelyn added, "Of course, that was just the big wound.  You were also suffering from moderate dehydration and blood loss, and most of the cuts and scrapes you had were infected.  That IV – " she nodded to an IV pole I hadn't noticed in my struggles " - is currently pumping you full of antibiotics and fluids."

I followed the tubing down from the IV bag to where it disappeared under my body and, presumably, into my arm, though I didn't feel the needle.  Maybe I was more out of it than I thought.

Still, I was alive, I was going to recover, and I was apparently on some very good drugs, so I decided to chalk all that up as a win.  Albeit a win that I knew nothing about.  I frowned.  "What happened, anyway?  Was Hauser the dirty agent after all?"

"Actually, Hauser was one of the four corrupt agents they've found so far.  They're still going through the documents on the flash drive."

I whistled, though it came out sounding more like a puff of air.  "I can see why Cabrillo was so determined to kill Natalie."

Jocelyn nodded. 

We sat in silence for a few moments, me feeling increasingly awkward and Jocelyn looking cool and picture-perfect.

I broke first.  "So what happens next?"

Jocelyn looked at me thoughtfully.  "I guess that depends on you.  What do you want to do?"

"See Natalie," I said instantly.

She nodded.  "I'll see what I can do."

Jocelyn wandered off, phone in hand, and I went back to contemplating my pillow.  Still, I was feeling lighter than I had in a while.  Maybe Jocelyn wasn't quite so terrible after all.

~~~

It took nearly a week before I was allowed to leave the hospital, during which time Natalie went from being in plain old custody to being in protective custody.  As far as I could tell from the information I managed to nag out of Jocelyn, the main difference between the two was the quality of the food.

"Why aren't you in protective custody?"

Jocelyn smirked at me.  "Because I'm smart enough not to testify.  Besides, I have a dead box of my own, and Cabrillo isn't the only one who will be caught with his pants down when I die."

Jocelyn visited me every day, making it increasingly difficult for me to continue to hate her.  On day three I finally broke down and told her about Paul; she promised to make some discreet calls to inform him, Mom, and Blythe that I was okay.  I was a little leery of miscalculating my own insignificance and of them getting caught up in something awful as a result, but Jocelyn assured me that she made all of her calls from a secure line.

Agent Harris showed up once I was deemed fit to answer questions and after offering a stiff apology on behalf of the FBI, she proceeded to subject me to a grueling, four-hour-long interrogation session.  I told her what happened to me and Natalie over and over again and, since I wasn't lying about the fact that I really didn't know much of anything about Cabrillo or his documents, she finally seemed to accept my story.  By that point I was so exhausted I very nearly cried in gratitude when she left.

When I finally did get to leave the hospital, Jocelyn was the one who gave me a ride and without my input she drove me straight to the FBI building.  By that point, I was feeling outright fond of her.

An impersonal female agent who was not Agent Harris met us in the waiting room and escorted me back to the interrogation room that I was placed in the last time I was in the building.  All things considered, I would've preferred not to see the inside of that room again, but the moment she opened the door all of my hesitation fled.  Natalie was sitting inside.

"Heather," she said, bolting to her feet and hurrying over to wrap me up in a bear hug.

I held out as long as I could against the pain in my back, but finally a whimper escaped me.  Natalie immediately let me go.  "Are you all right?"

"Fine," I said.  Before she could get annoyed, I added, "It's just my back's still healing."

Natalie immediately looked abashed.  "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," I told her, beaming like an idiot now that I didn't have someone squeezing my gunshot wound.  "I'm so glad to see you."

She smiled back.  "Me, too."

For a moment things were awkward, until Natalie gestured towards the chairs.  "So what's going on in the real world?" she asked as we settled in.

I laughed, and told her everything that had happened to me since I saw her last, which admittedly wasn't much outside of hospital stories.  In turn, Natalie told me about her adventures, which mostly seemed to consist of an endless series of interrogations and lawyer meetings.  "They want to take a deposition now," she said in a voice full of dark humor.  "In case Cabrillo gets to me before the case goes to trial."

I scowled at her.  "Is that very likely?"

"Honestly?" she asked, which was answer enough.

We stared at the table for several minutes, the air tense around us.  "Have you thought about it?" Natalie finally asked, her quiet voice loud in the silence of the room.

I quirked up a corner of my mouth, though I felt no humor.  "Witness protection?"  She nodded.  "What would you do if I said I had?"

Natalie swallowed, then leaned forward to take my hands.  "I'd ask you to come with me," she said sincerely.  I squeezed her hands tightly, but didn't answer.  Her voice was heavy as she guessed, "But you wouldn't."

I opened my mouth, only to hear a sob come out.  It took a couple of seconds for me to collect myself enough to be able to choke out, "I've never felt for anyone what I feel for you."

Natalie smiled sadly at me, and squeezed my hands back.  "But … " she prompted gently.

"But my mom and Blythe and … "

"And Paul," she concluded.

I nodded, feeling guilty even if there was no reason for it.  "I'm sorry."

"There's no reason to be sorry," she said softly.  "It's not a bad thing to be close to your family and friends.  Sometimes I wish – "  She cut herself off, shaking her head.  "It doesn't matter."

We stared at the table some more and I was acutely aware of the seconds passing, each one ticking away the last few minutes that I would ever spend with Natalie.

Abruptly Natalie said, "Witness protection doesn't have to be forever, you know."

My eyes snapped up to meet hers, as I felt a faint tendril of hope work its way into my heart.  "What?"

"I'll have to go away until the court case, of course, but after that I have more options."

I frowned at her.  "You think Cabrillo will just let you go after you put him behind bars?"

"No," Natalie admitted, and the hope in my chest died.  "But still ... I'll have options."

I forced a smile, doing my best to look like a woman who believed that she was coming back some day.  I must've been convincing, because she smiled back and pulled me into a kiss.  I concealed my tears and kissed her back with all my heart.


	15. Chapter 15

When I stepped out of the FBI building, Jocelyn was nowhere in sight.  Fortunately, I still had that last twenty dollar bill, which was just enough to get me to the nearest MARTA station with funds left over to buy a pass.  Without hesitation, I boarded the train for Decatur.  It was time for that shoulder to cry on.

The next week passed quietly.  To my surprise, I hadn't lost my job; apparently it was bad PR to fire a woman just because she was kidnapped for a few days and couldn't come to work.  They even gave me a couple of weeks off to "recover from the ordeal".  I took the time off and was grateful.

I was even more grateful that Paul and Nicole let me stay with them in Atlanta, even after Mom, Joe, and Blythe descended on the city.  All three of them were mightily ticked that they hadn't been able to come to the hospital to see me, and weren't particularly soothed when I explained that the restriction had been for their own safety.  After a few days of girl talk with Mom and Blythe and the long-suffering Joe, however, things settled back down to a semblance of normality.  Since they all had used up a year's worth of vacation time already to be with me, I finally managed to talk them all into going home, though I strongly suspected that I could look forward to daily phone calls from Mom and Blythe, at the very least, for the foreseeable future.

It was a couple of days later, as my hardship time off from work was running out and I was getting increasingly frantic about my lack of viable options, that there came a knock at the door.

I glanced at Paul.  "Expecting anyone?"

He shrugged as he stood up and moved to the door.  "Probably just one of the neighborhood kids wanting to see the chickens."  With a smile in place, he pulled the door open.

The person on the other side _definitely_ wasn't a kid.  "Hello," Jocelyn purred.  "You must be Paul."

Paul, bless him, rolled his eyes at her.  "And you must be Jocelyn.  Are you here to see Heather?"

Jocelyn, undaunted as ever, held up a set of keys.  "Just to drop these off."

I bolted up from the couch; those keys looked awfully familiar.  "Are those--?"

"Yep," Jocelyn said cheerfully.  Her phone chose that moment to ring and she frowned a little as she checked the caller ID.  "Here," she said, tossing the keys to me as she answered the phone. 

I grabbed them out of the air and eagerly headed for the door.  Just as I was about to pass her, Jocelyn held the phone away from her mouth and whispered, "Don't forget to check the glove compartment."

Intrigued as well as excited now, I stepped outside to see my Saturn looking better than ever.  Her windshield was repaired, the tires were intact, and as I got closer I could see that even the seats had been reupholstered or maybe even replaced, because that oil stain from a leaky pizza box a few years before was gone.

Feeling better than I had in days, I slipped in behind the wheel and rolled down the window to let out some of the heat as I looked around me with a pleased smile on my face.  After all of my worrying about not being able to afford to fix my car, it was an enormous relief to see her looking good as new. 

Remembering Jocelyn's words, I leaned over and popped the glove box.  I immediately slammed it shut and sat bolt upright, looking around with wide eyes to see if anyone was watching.

Reassured that I was in the clear, I leaned over again, this time a little more slowly, and eased the box back open.  Yep, they were still there: ten stacks of currency, as many as could possibly be crammed into the tiny space.

With one more quick look around, I pulled out one of the stacks.  It was about half an inch thick and a quick rifle confirmed that it was composed entirely of twenties. 

I took a deep breath and pulled out the rest of the stacks.  All of them were made of twenties.  If they were standard stacks of a hundred bills each, that meant I was looking at twenty thousand dollars.

"I'd put that away if I were you."

I jerked at the sound of Jocelyn's voice.  She laughed, leaning a little farther into the window in the process.  "Don't worry, it's just me.  But I'm serious about putting that away before someone sees it."

"Right," I said, flustered and already starting to shove the money back into the box. 

"Did you find the note?" Jocelyn asked as I was attempting to shove in one last bundle.

I frowned.  "What note?"

Jocelyn just laughed and patted me on the arm before walking away.  I watched her go in my rear-view mirror as she slid into the passenger side of a big black SUV, which promptly pulled away from the curb.

The moment she was out of sight, I was pulling the money back out again.  Sure enough, squeezed into the back of the box and slightly crumpled, was a note.  I pulled it out and shoved the money back in before picking the note up again.

I took a deep breath and reminded myself that Paul was just a few feet away and Mom and Blythe were on speed dial.  Whatever this note said, I would survive.

I opened the paper and read.

_Hey Heather,_

_Here's your car, hopefully good as new.  To be honest, I wanted to give you a new one, but Jocelyn said you'd rather have your car back.  The offer stands, though, if you're interested._

_I have so many things I want to tell you, but I don't have much time before my flight leaves.  Suffice to say that you saved my life out there in the Keys.  You are an amazing woman, Heather George, and it was a privilege to get to know you._

_Below you'll find an e-mail address and password.  If you choose never to use them, I'll understand.  My life is a dangerous one and you've already survived more than most would in the same situation._

_If you do choose to contact me, however, I would love to hear from you.  Just be sure to never do so from your home computer.  You never know who may be watching._

_Damn, they're telling me that it's time to go.  I'll e-mail you at the above address._

_Please write back._

_Love,_

_Natalie_

I closed the note and, following a mad, radiant urge, I pressed the paper to my lips.  Then, with a watery but beaming smile on my face, I turned on the car and pulled out into the street, already mapping out the shortest route to the nearest public computer.

Maybe I'd get a smoothie on the way.


End file.
